Vendetta
by draxal
Summary: Sequel to Road Trip. Scott and Stiles survived being stalked by a man who hunts monsters more dangerous than werewolves. But this hunter doesn't give up hunts easily, especially when he's after rare prey and a True Alpha is rarest of them all. More dangerous yet is the monster they thought they'd killed who has a Vendetta to settle with Scott and Stiles.
1. Chapter 1

_**VENDETTA**_

_Preface_

For a hundred years there had been nothing but instinct and blind fury and the unquenchable thirst for blood and fear and pain. That was all it had known, the rage of an unnatural beast, animal impulse, animal urges that fed upon the last vestiges of the soul of the thing it had once been. There had been no past, no future, no anything but the here and the now - - a slave to its primal nature. To hunt and to kill. To taste the warm blood of prey in its mouth. To rend flesh and break bone and revel in the death squeals of its victims.

Then the bullet had ripped through its eye, bored a path through the soft grey matter of its brain and torn out the back of its skull and something changed. In the healing, some integral part of itself that had been so long subsumed by the beast, flickered to life. As it lay, flesh and bone reknitting, in the cage the _Man_ had shoved it into, an awareness keener and more precise than it had known in time uncounted began to creep upon it.

Time began to have meaning. The beast had only known the here and the now, but the keener intelligence lurking beneath, had fleeting recollections of past. Recollections of violence and blood in this shape and the one before this - - and it savored them. It had always been a night stalker, lurking at the outskirts of transient human society. Taking prey and stirring legend in a land crueler and more barren by far than this place the Man had taken it to.

The Man. The giver of pain. And the beast hadn't understood. The beast had only cringed after a while in hard taught submission, as the man created new ways to break it to his will. To bend the instinct of a beast with an unquenchable thirst for the kill and use it for his own ends. To feed his own need for the giving of pain and suffering. The beast hadn't understood at the time, what the glint in the man's eye as he tormented it meant. But it knew now. It understood the joy that came with the infliction of agony. Shared appreciation did not make it hate him any less.

It had hunted for him. And brought down prey after prey. Until the wolf and the prey the wolf protected had brought it down instead. The taste of the wolf's blood was still in its mouth, vibrant and rich. When it licked its wounds - - inflicted upon it by the wolf and the bullets of the prey - - the wolf's blood was mingled with its own in its fur. A taste to be savored. When it sank its teeth into his flesh again, the blood would spurt hot and vital on its tongue. But it wouldn't kill him. Not right away. The beast would have, but the thing the beast had been - - the thing awakening again - - found its interest pricked.

The wolf had survived against it, when it had taken down packs of wolves before. And this one had only had one weak human prey to back it up. And this wolf had done it a favor that neither he nor the Man had realized. His claws had raked the hateful collar the Man had sealed around its neck. The collar that released poison into its veins when the Man chose to administer discipline. The toxins had been leaking with slow persistence out of the treacherous band, one drop at a time. And when they were gone, the Man would lose his edge.

The beast never would have understood that distinction. All the beast would have comprehended was the pain. The beast had cared very little about vengeance, the concept beyond its primal understanding. The emerging intellect behind it savored the notion.

And as missing pieces of it began to fall back into place, one more scrap of self-awareness began to take shape.

She. It was _She_. And she had slept a hundred years, imprisoned behind the façade and the mentality of a beast. Seething hatred and resentment boiled to the fore, as integral a part of her then as it was now. The beast had run with it, understanding rage, but she - - _she_ embraced it.

**# # # # #**

**1**

First day back from winter break and the halls of Beacon Hills High School were filled with kids who'd rather be anywhere but school. Two weeks reprieve from the hollowed halls of pre-higher education was simply not enough time to enjoy the passing of one year and the introduction of another. Not to mention the lazy fall of snow that had started sometime around first period and had progressed throughout the day, dusting the ground outside with a layer of pristine white. The first snowfall of the year. The first in a handful of years. Beacon Hills was far enough North in the interior of the state that they consistently got cold weather - - sometimes downright frigid temperatures - - but snow was sporadic.

Predictably, every student near a window stared mournfully outside, more mesmerized by far, in the fall of crystallized ice than they were with whatever subject their frustrated teachers were attempting to drill into their heads.

Scott McCall could have done without, having had more than his fair share of snow during the first part of winter break. Even so, he occasionally cast long, hazy looks out the window along with the rest of the class. But that was more from absolute boredom than any particular longing to go outside and tromp around in the winter wonderland into which the school grounds had been transformed.

Mrs. Thacker was about 100 years old and spoke like she was fighting off an attack of mutated chewing gum, slowly and laboriously drawing out each word. Pair that with a lecture regarding the American Industrial Revolution, which she'd likely experienced first hand - - and half the class was ready to kill themselves to simply end the torture.

He glanced across the row of desks to Stiles, who was industriously scribbling away in his notebook. He'd done a pretty nice rendering of a large breasted, sword wielding Amazonian warrior, but then he'd been working on it for most of class.

"Dream date?" Scott leaned a little across the row to inquire softly, even though it was doubtful Ms. Thacker would hear unless they were actually shouting at each other.

Stiles glanced up from his work with a smirk and tilted the masterpiece up so Scott could get a better look. She _was_ sort of hot. Stiles had a knack for drawing boobs, garnered from long hours of reading comics and playing video games featuring curvaceous heroines. The blood dripping off her sword and the severed head in her hand was a little disturbing.

"Nice," Scott admitted.

"Damn right."

Stiles bent back over his notebook and Scott sighed, slouching a little deeper in his desk, listening to the rhythmic tick tock of the clock. It was more than the boredom of class that had him on edge.

Ten days. It had been ten days of waiting for the other shoe to fall - - waiting for an attack from a man Chris Argent said didn't easily give up hunts once he'd begun them. A man Argent had claimed was a ruthless, brutal bastard - - as if Scott didn't know first hand - - and it hadn't happened.

Nothing had happened. Those first few days of expecting it had had him jumping at shadows. Nerves so taut strung that he'd had to put a concerted effort into not popping claw every time someone came up behind him or caught him unawares.

He'd texted Stiles pretty constantly those first few days, when he wasn't around to keep an eye on. He couldn't help it. He wasn't the only one that had evaded Dupont's hunt. And Stiles, who had already been bouncing off walls with anxiety, whose imagination for the macabre needed no fuel whatsoever, fed off Scott's case of nerves and went just slightly insane.

Part of that probably also had to do with the lack of vehicular transportation. Being paranoid and stranded at home with nothing but time on his hands and an internet that gave him access to any number of disturbing informational sources had sent him into a fit of Adderall fueled mania. Suffice to say Scott had spent a lot of time over Stiles' house or vice versa during the last week of winter break, both for his own peace of mind as well as Stiles'.

But break passed and nothing out of the ordinary happened. And it was exhausting, constantly worrying over threat that never came. Constantly listening for that sound that was out of place, or scenting after the waft of gunpowder or the distinctive smell of a certain cigar was starting to make _him_ just a little crazy, so there was nothing to do but ease up and let himself relax.

Stiles wasn't entirely following suit. He tended to hold onto his obsessions a _**lot**_ longer than Scott, but he was getting better.

When the bell rang Stiles was out of his seat and stalking towards the door before Scott had stuffed his books into his backpack. Scott caught up with him at Lydia's locker. Stiles was in the process of badgering her for the umpteenth time since they'd gotten back from their little road trip and subsequent horror movie adventure, regarding any premonitions she might have experienced concerning the state of his continued existence.

As far as Scott knew, she'd stopped responding to his texts about three days ago. Stiles had been bitching about her lack of responses to _him_ since.

"Any dreams the last few nights? Do you see me dying anytime soon? How about Scott? Do you get the feeling of any of us dying from anything bullet related?"

"I'm thinking about shooting you, myself. Does that count?" She gave him a faint, humorless smile.

He glared at her, exasperated, until she finally stomped a foot and snapped. "I'm not a magic 8 ball for death. And as much as I might like to have the ability, its not a switch I can turn off an on. And even if I could, can we just assume that maybe - - just maybe, there's nothing for me _to_ sense? Maybe we'll actually have a semester free of death and mutilation."

Stiles swung his gaze to Scott for backup. But honestly, Scott was rather hoping Lydia's take on things might prove true.

"She might be right. We're due some good luck."

"Yeah and maybe I'll hit the lottery and pigs will fly out of my ass and you'll get a 4.0 GPA. Any other fantasies you want to promote?"

"Not particularly," he said tightly, meeting Stiles' glower with a glare of his own.

Lydia rolled her eyes, then glanced past them, her smile turning marginally predatory as one of the Twins approached down the hall. Up close he could distinguish between the two from their scent. Half a hallway away in the midst of dozens of kids, he had to assume it was Aidan from the fact that Lydia assumed it was Aidan.

"As interesting as your preoccupation with your own death is, I've got a free period to make use of." Lydia handed her books off to Aidan.

He gave her a half smile, half leer. Stiles' eyes got narrower.

Aidan sort of ignored Stiles altogether, but he gave Scott a nod of acknowledgement. Free of Deucalion's influence, the twins _chose_ to be here. But they maintained a certain distance. Deaton said that what Deucalion had done wasn't natural. That alphas by nature, when they weren't competing for territory, or assembling for rare gatherings, gave each other space. That the instinct to assert power - - to try each other was too strong. Scott didn't feel it. But then, he wasn't a _born_ wolf, or a conventional alpha, so maybe there was a difference.

Maybe the impulse wasn't so strong with the twins either, since they'd been omega's before they'd become alphas. Maybe there was a difference because they hadn't been quite the same since the Darach had almost killed them - - as if that near death experience had drained something from them. Maybe survival instinct was just stronger with them than the instinct to lead. But not always. Aidan sometimes gave him the occasional _look_, like he was contemplating testing him, before he'd shake it off and go about his business.

Stiles stood there, visibly fuming while Lydia flounced off with Aidan. It was hard to say which element of that encounter had pissed him off more; Lydia's failure to give proper death premonitions or her insinuations that free period was going to be used for more than studying. But then Stiles was more than capable of griping about multiple things at once, so maybe both.

"Would you just try and relax? Just a little?" Scott clapped a hand on his shoulder and steered him away from the lockers.

Stiles continued to simmer for at least half the hall, before he finally took a breath and relented. "Its just the not knowing that gets to me, y'know?"

"Yeah." Scott most certainly did.

"It makes me crazy."

"I've noticed."

Stiles cast him a look. "The fact that you're so chill just sort of makes me want to slap you around a little."

"I promise you, I wasn't chill. You know I wasn't. But I got better. I mean there's a point where you have to stop tearing yourself up. If something happens, it happens. And if it does, I'll deal with it. There's not much else I can do."

"I like to be proactive."

"How?"

Stiles sniffed, not having an answer to that.

They headed their separate ways then, Scott to geometry and Stiles to pre-calculus, the last classes of the day, before they had to head outside for the first mandatory after school meeting for pre-season lacrosse. He looked forward to it. It was a distraction from things no normal seventeen year old ought to be dealing with, and a good one. And hopefully the world wouldn't conspire this season to complicate his life to the point where he couldn't concentrate on the game.

It would be good for Stiles too, if he could manage to make first line this season. He needed the distraction as badly as Scott did.

They met up after class, finding each other in the mass migration of students heading for lockers or the exits. Apparently Stiles had been thinking about the upcoming pre-season pow wow as well, because he was off the impending death by big game hunter tirade and onto fretting over the state of his lacrosse skills. They hadn't gotten in a lot of practice during off-season. There'd been a lot of distractions.

He lost track a little of what Stiles was saying when he saw Allison weeding her way through the crowded hallway towards them. The jacket and the bulky layered sweaters she had on did nothing to detract from how long her legs looked in skinny jeans and knee high boots. If he ever looked at her and didn't appreciate how good she looked, he 'd probably be one breath away from dead.

"Scott. I want to talk to you." There was something in the tone of her voice and the way she was holding herself that triggered alarms.

He stopped, Stiles lingering beside him, as she marched up.

"Hey, Alli - -"

"What did you say to Isaac?" She cut him off mid-greeting.

"Umm - - what?"

"All week long I could barely get him to talk to me - - and finally when I pin him down, do you know what he says?"

"Uhh - -"

He was peripherally aware of Stiles easing away from him and migrating into the crowd of exiting students, but most of his attention was on Allison's angry brown eyes and the finger she was presently using to stab at his chest. She was pissed off at him for some bewildering reason and it was ridiculous that half his mental resources were focused on the very potent scent of honey and sunflowers wafting from her hair.

"He said that maybe he and I ought to 'back off a little' because you're having problems with him 'doing' your ex. That's what he said."

Scott blinked past the scent of her hair and stared at her in surprise. "He said _**I**_ said that? Allison, I didn't. I wouldn't."

He floundered, trying to recall if maybe he _had_ done something that day he'd been hyped on wolfsbane, but most of it was hazy and indistinct in his memory.

"If I needed someone to chase off my dates, I've got my father," she said, low, calm voice. But then when Allison got angry, she went cool and calm. Her indignation was contained, evident by the stillness of her body, by the cold intensity of her eyes. Frankly, it was scary as hell when it was directed at him.

She took a step forward and he sort of instinctively took half a one back. "He listens to you and you had no right."

"I know - - " The finger on his chest had morphed into five, the feel of her fingertips burning through his shirt.

"I'm trying, Scott. I'm really trying - -" she said, and the cool in her voice broke a little. Her breathing did. She closed her hand, making a sudden fist, as if she'd only just realized where her fingers had been.

"Trying to do what?" He felt like he was missing some integral part of the conversation.

She opened her mouth, shut it, a furrow crinkling her brow, before she shook her head and took that step backwards that allowed Scott to breathe again.

"It doesn't matter," she mumbled, suddenly sounding as confused as he felt. "Okay. Okay - - I believe you."

And she left him there, just like that, back against the lockers, feeling like he'd been blindsided by a 5'8 Mack truck. It took him a moment to get his bearings. A moment to get his brain functioning again enough to figure out that if there was blame to place for overstepping boundaries, just whose sneakers to lay it at.

Stiles.

He caught up with him halfway to the athletics field behind the main building. It didn't matter to Coach that the ground was covered in a layer of white, nor that snow was still drifting down. The whole first semester, he'd been itching to get back to Lacrosse and pre-season was finally here. He'd have had them out on the field for his pre-season pep talk if there'd been tornados and floods of biblical proportions bearing down on them.

"You prick," Scott accused, as they were tromping through snow along with the rest of the old team and the new hopefuls. "Allison just tore my head off. And it's your fault."

Stiles tossed him an offended look. "How is it my fault that Allison bitch slapped you?"

"Because you said something to Isaac and Isaac said something to her and now she thinks I'm the asshole, when really, the asshole is you." Scott got out in one belabored breath.

"Really? Really?" Stiles waved a hand at the world in general. "The person who stands up for you when you're too much of a wuss to do it yourself - - the person who always has your back is the asshole?"

Scott glared at that flagrant attempt to guilt him into retreat.

"Yes," he hissed, lowering his voice as they caught up with the mingling crowd of feet stomping, shivering kids on the field. "What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything." Stiles declared, then, after a moment or two of consideration amended. "Well, not much of anything. I left it up to him to figure out on his own."

"God." Scott glanced over his shoulder at the last stragglers making their way across the field, one of which was Isaac. He'd been really, really distracted the last week of winter break, but now that he thought about it, Isaac had been a little more 'twitchy' than usual. A little more on edge. Not avoiding him - - actually staying pretty damned close - - just not doing a lot of talking. Not making a lot of eye contact. Scott had just figured he was waiting for that other shoe along with the rest of them.

When maybe it had been something else entirely.

One part of him, the part that had wanted to put his teeth to Isaac's throat during the full moon, was very much okay with Isaac feeling a healthy dose of insecurity. The other part, the part that considered Isaac a friend, the part that felt the need to look out for a kid that had been beaten down and broken before he'd become a wolf, needed to make this right. The two parts combined were going out of their way to make his life more complicated than it already was.

He cast one more annoyed look at Stiles, and headed back to intercept Isaac, no earthly idea what he was going to say.

"Hey, Isaac, can I talk to you a minute?"

Isaac shrugged, falling back and letting the other boys walk ahead.

Scott took a breath and plunged in. "Listen, whatever Stiles said to you," he cast a look over his shoulder to where Stiles was pretending he wasn't paying them any attention. "Ignore it. If you and Allison have a thing - - it doesn't _matter_ if I'm okay with it. Its her call."

It sort of felt like he was plunging a blade into his own heart with the words. Stupid, stubborn heart that just couldn't make itself stop feeling _feelings_ for her. Maybe he _was_ that stalkery guy that couldn't get over his ex.

Isaac hunched his shoulders a little, staring at him, blue eyes wary. "_**Are**_ you okay with it?"

That was not the question to ask him when Allison practically biting his head off in the hall had made his blood rush and his palms sweat. And he could have dealt with it so much better, if _her_ heart hadn't been pounding so hard by the time she'd fled, that he practically hadn't needed werewolf hearing to notice it. He could lie outright, just to put Isaac's mind at rest, since that's what Allison seemed to want - - but then, he wasn't feeling that degree of altruism. Not with this.

"No. But like I said, it doesn't matter what I think."

"We haven't done it," Isaac blurted, then shrugged awkwardly and said with Isaac's usual talent for bluntness. "Not that I don't want to - - it's sort of hard _not_ to want to, because Allison's really, r_eally_ hot."

Which was again, not what Scott wanted to hear, but his head whirled with the implications of the information, because he'd really thought they were.

"Seriously? So are we talking first base? Second? What?" Scott had no idea when Stiles had moved in, werewolf hearing not nearly so good when he was busy digging holes in his own head that he might not easily be able to get out of.

He cast Stiles a warning look. Isaac stuck his hands in his pockets and glowered, no happier than Scott was to be having this conversation at all, Scott was sure.

He was never so happy to hear the shrill bleat of Coach Finstock's whistle. He stood there, barely listening as Coach paced before the gathered group, envisioning grand things, almost manic in his over caffeinated enthusiasm for the upcoming season.

"So, I call you on being a dick and you run right to your girlfriend and complain?" Stiles whispered across Scott to Isaac.

Isaac glowered back. "Shut up. And I didn't."

"Yeah, right." Stiles snorted. "And is she? You guys refer to yourselves as boyfriend/girlfriend yet? Or is it a just friends fooling around sort of thing?"

"I'm gonna just smash my fist into your face sort of thing," Isaac growled.

"Oh really? Right here? Right now?"

Scott wanted to smash his fist into both their faces. Between the two of them - - between the two of them and _Allison_ - - he was starting to feel slightly homicidal.

"McCall!" Coach screamed at him and he started, blinking in surprise at Finstock's red face and slightly fanatical stare.

"Yeah, coach?"

"Are you even listening? Are you too busy day dreaming about ponies and easy bake ovens to give this team the attention it deserves?"

"Uh - -no, coach."

"That's good. Because we lost a third of our first line to graduation. And when Jackson decided to take a tour of _Europe_," coach made a face and emphasized the word with air quotations. "He left a big hole to be filled. Are you ready to go from co-captain to just captain, McCall? Are you man enough to fill Jackson's hole?"

"Ummm - - yes?" He heard Stiles choking a little at his side.

Coach just pumped a fist, oblivious to the words that came out of his own mouth and went on.

"Tryouts are next week and just because you made the team last year doesn't mean someone better won't come along this year and knock you out of your spot." He eyed several of the old team members meaningfully. "Do you guys want to be shown up by a bunch of freshmen? Can you imagine that humiliation? You'll be pariahs in your own school if some pimple-faced freshman kicks your ass on the field. And if some of you morons don't know what that means - - then look it up! So I expect you all to bring your best game to try-outs and make me proud."

There was more along that vein. More stomping and fist shaking and wild-eyed sports analogies that didn't always have anything to do with sports - - but then Coach sometimes got distracted with the passion of his own tirades.

When Coach finally let them go, they migrated off the field in clumps. Isaac sort of drifted towards Danny and a few other of the old players, likely taking any excuse not to continue the painfully uncomfortable conversation they'd been having. Of course it wasn't like they could avoid each other successfully, what with living under the same roof and all. Just the idea of all the awkwardness likely to crop up was enough to make Scott cringe inwardly.

"This could get awkward," Stiles remarked, apparently precisely tuned in to whatever wavelength Scott's brain was currently working on. "Because of him living in your house and all."

"It won't get awkward." He ground out. "I won't let it get awkward."

"How are you gonna stop it? With your Gandhi-like powers of harmony and peace? What if he brings her over for a make out session? You're gonna start shredding furniture."

Scott whipped an irritated look at him. "He's not bringing her over for a make out session."

"Right, because her dad is so cool with her dating werewolves that her place is the best option. How'd that work out for you so far as uninterrupted quality time went?"

"Would you shut up?" Stiles was systematically working his last nerve. And now he had him thinking about just how _much_ uninterrupted quality time he and Allison had managed to find at her house, even when she'd had _both_ parents around to kill their buzz. It was depressing.

"Hey, at least she's got a type. Personally I don't get lycanthropy as a turn on, but to each his own."

"Oh my God - - you're finding your own way home. I'm already late for work." He stalked off, visions of Stiles trudging home through five miles of snow making him very happy at the moment.

"What? You're stranding me?"

"Call your dad. Ride the bus. I don't care."

"You suck," Stiles yelled after him, then clarified. "Balls. Big, hairy balls."


	2. Chapter 2

**2**

It wasn't often Allison Argent felt like a fool. She did now. A complete, over reactive fool.

So she did what she usually did when her nerves were raw and she needed to breathe. She took her bow and went to her favorite place in the woods and proceeded to decimate a tree. The tree didn't mind. The tree didn't have feelings to be hurt. And if the tree felt pain - - well, Allison had come to the realization that the infliction of a little pain now and then - - especially the well deserved type - - effected the quality of her sleep not at all. There were some things that needed to be done and the people that needed doing them either bucked up, or got out of the way.

She wouldn't be a bystander ever again, that was a promise she'd made to herself. And the things that hindered that life decision, the things that made her weak - - even if some of those things had a place in her heart that could not be shaken - - were things she willingly deprived herself of.

She was eighteen. She didn't need to be head over heels in love. She just wanted to have a good time with someone she liked. To enjoy what was left of her high school years without being consumed by a boy. She'd been there, she'd done that and the problem with love was it made you vulnerable. Weak. And she was never going to be weak again. Never going to allow things to slip past her notice because all she could think about was the way he kissed, or the feel of his hand on her skin, or the way she could make him lose his concentration just by smiling at him, or all the hundred little things about him that became just so overwhelmingly important that they drowned out the rest of the world. Because maybe, if she'd been paying attention things might have been different. And she hated herself a little bit every time she thought about that possibility. And maybe sometimes she hated Scott a little for the same reason.

It wasn't fair to him. It didn't make sense, but then, neither did love.

Isaac didn't make her weak. She could like Isaac, want to be with Isaac, without wanting to lose herself in him.

So she'd lost her cool with Scott. And she'd been a little bit of a fool with Isaac, because she hadn't understood. She still didn't. Not the things going on inside her own head any more than she did his.

Scott she could read. Scott was all open emotion and painful honesty even when he was desperately trying to deflect. But Isaac had that little bit of furtiveness you'd expect from someone who'd grown up expecting the worst kind of abuse. He had shutters that he sometimes pulled closed that even a perceptive girl couldn't see past.

She wasn't sure if she was more upset with him backing away from her because of something Scott might have said to him, or from the notion that what Scott thought mattered more to him than a budding relationship with her. Some beta/alpha thing maybe. Or maybe even the simple painful fact that Isaac's loyalty to Scott, deep down, outweighed his attraction to her.

Either way it came down to Scott. It always came down to Scott. Who she couldn't _not_ believe when he had that earnest surprise in his eyes. Taken seriously off his guard by her attack. And maybe she'd been taken a little by surprise by it too. When she went on attack, it was usually thought out, with tactics in mind and a clear course of retreat laid out. But as soon as Isaac had spoken those words - - _Scott's upset with me doing his ex_ - - something inside her had burst. She hadn't been able to find Scott soon enough to give him her opinion of the subject.

And Scott hadn't even been the culprit. Of course Scott hadn't, because Scott didn't go out of his way to create conflict. That was his partner in crime, who didn't have a smoothly working filter between brain and mouth. Stiles. Who knew Scott better than Scott knew himself, so maybe if he'd said it - - there was truth behind it, and she didn't know what to do with that.

She blew out a breath and focused on the shaft presently poised on the string of her bow. She let it fly and it joined three of its comrades in the trunk of a rough barked pine, close enough that the fletching touched.

For a moment she stood, arm relaxed, watching her breath fog before her face, listening to the sound of utter silence as snow drifted down through the winter foliage overhead. She spun, snatching an arrow from the quiver at her back and releasing the shot before she'd fully finished the turn. The arrow thudded home in another tree, again nestling close with another black fletched bolt. She was better than she had been, and she'd been very, very good. Before, when she'd been that naïve girl that thought things like werewolves the stuff of romantic legend and horror movie fodder, all she'd ever fired at were straw filled targets. She was battle tested now. She could hit a moving target without losing a beat. She could hit a living one without a ghost of hesitation. And had.

Grim practicality learned from an aunt and a grandfather who'd stopped at nothing to get a job done. But they'd held no distinctions. They'd seen no grey between their stark blacks and whites. And somewhere along the way they'd lost their grip on the humanity they claimed they were fighting to protect.

So yes, she'd learned the harsh side of reality from two ruthless teachers.

Honor, she learned from her father.

The trees gave up the shafts she'd driven into them. She pulled them out, inspected each head and each set of fletchings before putting them back into the quiver at her back. Then she walked. Away from the path leading back to the car. The tension had bled out of her, like sap from a tree, and wood was too beautiful, covered in snow not to appreciate now that violence was not her primary goal.

It was a familiar path, made foreign with the snow. She usually ran it twice a week, weather permitting, a long arc through the woods, around the pond where an old quarry used to be and back. She walked it now, the bow propped across her shoulder, with mittens replacing the archery gloves and a crocheted cap on her head.

She hadn't wanted to hurt Scott. God knew she didn't want to hurt Scott, because Scott hurt hit her like a fist in the gut every time. Isaac had just been easy company. And there was an attraction between them that was different than the one she felt for Scott. And new and different and easy was what she needed in her life.

She needed to talk to Scott when she wasn't quivering with indignation. She'd been so annoyed at what Isaac had said - - the other aspect of it hadn't really sank in. Scott wasn't dealing well with the fact that she was dating both a friend and his current roommate. She could understand it, now that it slapped her in the face. But then again, it wasn't her fault they both ran with the same circle of friends. It wasn't as if she had the time or the inclination to go out and meet new people. People who weren't in the know. People she'd have to lie to about so very many aspects of her life. And she understood so very well, how much lies could hurt. Even well intentioned ones.

The trees thinned out on the left side of the trail, which ran along the edge of a big old farmhouse that had been empty and for rent as long as Allison had been running this trail. Smoke issued from the chimney now. And there was a SUV with snow on the roof and the hood pulled up next to the house. There was someone out in the vast snow covered expanse of field between the house and the woods. A girl, by the look of it, in a winter coat and a knit cap.

The girl saw her, and canted her head, curious. It was either keep going, melt back into the woods and avoid having to explain walking about with a bow and a quiver of arrows, or assuage her own curiosity.

Allison chose the latter, tromping through overgrown grass barely covered by snow towards the girl.

"Its nice to see snow for a change," she smiled in greeting.

The girl, who was not quite so young as she'd seemed from a distance, eyed her critically, taking in the bow and the quiver strapped to her back. "This barely counts as snow. This is just a winter tease. Doing a little hunting?"

"No. Just practicing. The trees don't criticize when I'm off my mark." She smiled.

"And does that happen often?"

There was something a little off putting about the young woman. She was pretty enough, with a bob cut and a heart shaped face, college age at least, but there was something a little cold in her eyes. Maybe it was just the weaponry a stranger out of the woods came bearing.

"No," she admitted. "So, you've moved in here? I'm surprised the old place is livable?"

The girl shrugged. "There's nothing like a project."

"I'm Allison, by the way. Just so you have a name to go with the girl running through the woods with the bow and arrows."

The girl did smile a little then, a little loosening of that guarded expression.

"Erin!" A man stepped out of the cavernous old barn behind the house. Too distant to see anything but a shape, but his voice carried.

The girl started, glancing back, brows drawn for a moment, before she turned back to Allison with cool blue eyes. "My uncle is an artist. He likes his privacy. Don't make him tell you to keep off his property himself. He's not as polite as I am."

"Ahh- - sure." Allison blinked at the blatant warning. "I didn't know. I was just curious."

The girl lifted a brow. "You know what they say about curiosity - -" Then she turned and trudged through the snow back towards the house.

Allison took a breath, mittened hand tight on the bow. The dark shape of the man still stood in the doorway of the barn, staring towards her. When she retreated back into the shelter of the wood, and turned for one more look, he was gone and so was the girl.

# # #

Stiles road the bus home. The _bus_. It was humiliating sitting there along with the freshmen and the band geeks and the rest of the carless losers.

A pair of pimply-faced freshmen sat across from him, eagerly rifling through a set of Pokeman cards, not even realizing they were inviting ridicule from the heavy browed pair of assholes sitting behind them. Which they got in the form of spitballs to the back of the heads. Which might have ended there, since the freshmen were in no wise prepared to retaliate against their bigger badder, tormentors, save that poor aim sent one of those saliva moistened missiles past its intended target and into the ear of the kid sitting in front of them. That kid and his seatmate took offense and the ensuing school bus brawl had the bus driver screaming for them to sit down over the din of kids either crying encouragement, or cringing in their seats to avoid getting clipped by the tussle.

Stiles slouched in the much patched vinyl seat and fumed over the indignity he had to suffer just because Scott was having a rare fit of hissy. The whole being late for work excuse being valid was just a happy coincidence. The twenty minutes it would have taken Scott to drop him off at home wouldn't have gotten him into hot water with Deaton. Scott was just annoyed because Stiles had inadvertently forced a confrontation that he hadn't wanted to face. Scott would have been perfectly happy holding it all in and suffering in silence.

Idiot.

And Stiles knew from love-addled idiots. It wasn't like Lydia wasn't his premier masturbatory fantasy material. It wasn't like he hadn't constructed a hundred scenarios in his mind of the day she'd finally get a clue and realized he was the best thing that would ever happen to her. Every boy she'd ever dated he sort of hated, up to and including the surlier half of the Wonder Twins. But he had an outlet. He bitched about it at least twice a week to Scott, who tended to be an exemplary listener, even if he had the habit of occasionally zoning out when Stiles was in the middle of a tirade. When Scott and Allison had actually been together, Scott had told him pretty much _everything_ - - it was only after Allison had decided to 'take a break' - - Scott's term - - that he'd gone silent on the subject. It just wasn't healthy, holding it all in. No seventeen year old on the planet was Zen enough to deal with the crazy myriad of problems Scott had had to deal with over the last year and a half- - his love life or lack thereof the least of the bunch - - and not be expected to eventually snap. Stiles expected it daily.

He dug in the refrigerator when he got home, stuffed a few slices of turkey into mouth and grabbed a soda, before retreating to his room. He kicked off his shoes and woke up his computer, settling down play a little Warcraft to settle school bus frazzled nerves. He had a level 68 Death Knight that needed to kick some ass. After about an hour of adventuring, he got bored and hungry again and wandered back into the kitchen to find something more substantial to eat. He thought about calling his dad and seeing whether he wanted to pick up something on his way home - - there was an Italian place a few doors down from the sheriff's office that Stiles could have happily lived in, but then, his dad might not be counted on to get home before six or seven if he got tied up at the station, and Stiles stomach was not prepared to wait that long to eat.

He could whip up some pretty decent spaghetti himself with the proper ingredients. So he sautéed some onions and peppers and plopped a can of Ragu on top, spooned half of the mixture onto pasta and left the other half covered on the stove for his dad when he finally got home.

He took his bowl back into his room and sat down in front of the computer again. This time he pulled up his piddling little file on the family Dupont. He'd been scouring the net since they'd gotten home from their ill-fated road trip looking for information on the man that had come so close to killing them. But finding a trail was like looking for breadcrumbs in an aviary. It was non-existent. The majority of what little information he'd gleaned had come from Allison's dad, and Chris Argent wasn't the chattiest person alive. He told you what you needed to know and left it at that. So Stiles knew the basics. The Dupont's had been big game hunters for generations, old family money fueling the trade. It was only the last few generations that had narrowed their focus to the sort of big game that most people never knew existed. Dupont's father had been the first. According to Argent, the elder Dupont had been in tight with Gerad, which just figured. Murderous assholes tended to flock together.

His other subject of interest had gained him a little more success. All it had taken was the Googling of 'vanago' and he'd starting scoring. Mentions of it in turn of the century Slavic folklore. A few disturbingly accurate etchings. A little deeper digging and he'd actually found an old photo from the late 1900's of a group of Polish hunters posing by the hulking corpse of what might have been a giant malformed, black bear. Unless you'd seen one in the flesh and knew better. The picture it was paired with was a lot grimmer. A shot of a line of canvas covered bodies - - a lot of canvas-covered bodies - - of the victims the thing had taken down before it had fallen itself.

Dupont's retelling of the vanago legend was close to the ones Stiles found online. Murderous, unnatural beasts that had once been men. Deserters from the Tsar's army, slaughtering and robbing anyone unlucky enough to cross their paths, until their last victims, a family of Polish gypsies had laid a curse upon them with their dying breaths. Transforming beastly men into true beasts. Personally Stiles would have wished them into the forms of ill-tempered slugs over unstoppable killing machines, but he supposed when you were bargaining with some higher power for vengeance with your dying breath, beggars couldn't be choosers.

He spent a little time browsing other Russian folklore - - because now that the door was open on the existence of supernatural creatures, who the hell knew what might crop up - - so it paid to be in the know, just in case.

His fingers were poised on the keyboard, when something thudded outside his window. He froze, staring out half drawn shades into the early darkness that came with winter shortened days. His heart thudded right up his chest and lodged in the area of his esophagus. A whole ten days worth of nerves strung so tight they were literally fraying at the edges had him imagining the worst sort of serial killer/monster/gun-toting hunter outside his house. He reached for his phone, trying to even out his breathing, trying to decide which would be worse, him dying a gruesomely violent death at the hands of something or someone about to break into his house - - or him suffering the emasculating embarrassment of placing a panicked call to his dad - - or Scott and having it turn out to be absolutely nothing.

He stuffed the phone in his pocket and grabbed the bat by his desk. The metal was cool against his skin, the weight of the thing comfortable in his hand. Not as comforting as a big ass gun that fired a lot of bullets in a short amount of time, but then, if he happened to accidentally shoot any of the neighbors in a spray of sporadic gunfire - - even if he was aiming at something that deserved a few bullets - - his dad would probably be pissed.

The bat it was then and he held gripped it tight, holding it against his shoulder as he eased out the back door looking for anything out of the ordinary. There was just snow and the neighbor's cat perched on one of the fence posts, staring at him with indolent yellow eyes. The cat didn't seem concerned about anything lurking, but then again, unless you were another cat - - or a werewolf - - this cat hated Scott with a passion - - the cat wasn't particularly concerned about anything but the food it mooched from half the houses on the street. It was a fat cat.

Stiles gave it a look, and it feigned interest in something else, ignoring him. There was a big clump of snow on the ground outside his window, and bare patch on the roof, where it had slid off. That had been the noise. He felt the fool. He'd been jumping at shadows all week long and for good reason, but maybe Scott had a point. A little loosening of his guard wouldn't be a bad thing.

# # #

When Scott got home from work, his mom's car was in the drive and there was the smell of frying beef wafting out from the kitchen. Late taco night. He rolled his bike into the garage, stomped the snow off his boots and headed into the house via the backdoor. His mom was at the stove, still in work scrubs and Isaac was sitting at the kitchen table, chopping vegetables. They both looked up when he came up.

His mom smiled a greeting. "Hey sweetheart. Your timing's perfect, dinner's almost ready."

Isaac looked down, concentrating on the tomato he was dicing. Scott could almost smell the awkwardness condensing in the air. His fault. His decision to 'makes things right' and he thought he might have screwed things up more than smoothed them over.

He stood there for a second, not knowing what to do with himself, until his mom turned another look his way, a slight curious smile twitching at her mouth and suggested a course of action. "Go put your things away then come and put the taco shells in the toaster oven."

He could do that. He half caught Isaac flicking a cautious glance his way as he went into the hall to shrug off his jacket and drop his backpack by the stairs. Wary of him. Which was not what he'd wanted.

He blew out a breath and walked back into the kitchen, avoiding eye contact himself. Broke open the cellophane wrapping on the shells and stuck the stacked pile of them into the toaster oven.

"Separate them a little," his mom suggested. He followed that advice and stood there, staring at the toaster toast like it was the most interesting feat in the world.

"Isaac, we need diced tomatoes not puree," Isaac got a little culinary advice as well. Scott half glanced over his shoulder to see the pile of tomato mush under the knife in Isaac's hand.

His mom didn't have the time or energy with her work schedule to do a lot of sit down dinners, but she knew a lost soul when she saw one and had been going out of her way to make Isaac feel included. The almost three months that he'd 'officially' been here she'd made sure they'd had at least twice weekly meals where she did her duty and made them sit down at the kitchen table and take a few precious minutes to eat, while she grilled them about their days. He couldn't have loved her more for the effort.

Tonight it was making his palms itch, as she filled the void of their conspicuous silence, forcing monosyllable answers from them with increasingly pointed questions.

Isaac made his getaway as soon as the plates were cleaned, claiming homework with a muttered excuse. Scott retreated to his own room before she could really pin him down with the questions the look in her eyes suggested she was dying to ask.

He dumped the contents of his backpack on the bed, staring at the array of books. There was a bio lab pamphlet he was supposed to go over for tomorrow, an English lit reading assignment - - but he was having trouble focusing. He'd made a mess of things today with that one bit of brutal honesty, when a lie would have been kinder for everyone. For Allison and for Isaac at any rate. The ache he felt had become pretty familiar. And hopeless. No wonder she'd been pissed at him. Seven months and he still hadn't gotten the clue.

"Honey, do you want to talk?"

God. His mom stood in the doorway, that look of worried concern on her face that made him want to hide in the bathroom or jump out the window to avoid her sympathy.

"Not really," he pulled the bio lab booklet out of the pile on the bed and tossed it down amidst the clutter of his desk. "I've got homework - -"

"You can take a minute and tell me what was up between you and Isaac tonight? Did you two have a fight?"

"No. Mom, it's nothing. Really."

She lifted a brow. "It didn't look like nothing. The two of you could barely look at each other. Does this have to do with Allison?"

"No," he denied it immediately. She kept looking at him, that little furrow between her brows that said very clearly that she knew bullshit when she heard it. A year ago he would have clung to the lie, but then he wasn't that same kid and she deserved better.

He blew out a breath, sat down on the edge of the bed and admitted. "Sorta of. Maybe."

She made a little sound of assent and sat down beside him. "Isaac and Allison have been spending a lot of time together."

He cast a look her way and shrugged.

"Okay," she nodded, digesting that in silence for a moment. "And you didn't see it coming?"

He opened his mouth. Shut it. Tried to suss out in his head what he'd known and what he hadn't. What he'd denied in his own mind and what he'd accepted at face value.

"I don't know. Maybe. Yes. I thought I was okay with it. I thought - -"

He took a breath, feeling things bottling up, feeling that hard little knot in the back of his throat that signaled a weakness he in no wise wanted to show to his mom. She sat there silently, waiting him out.

"I messed up," he finally said. I was trying to make things better, but made them worse instead."

She sighed, patting his thigh. "Sweetheart, you're a lot of things, but a saint isn't one of them. You're human and human's _feel_. And feelings are complicated and messy. I can promise you, you're not the first person to stick your foot in your mouth when emotions are involved."

He gave her a dubious look. She smiled wryly, shrugging. "I've embarrassed myself more times than I'd like to admit, so maybe it's a family trait."

"God." Which was not what he wanted to hear.

"You still have feelings for her." It wasn't a question. She knew him too well for it to be a question.

He groaned, flopping back and dragging a pillow over his face. "How do I stop?"

"The last time we had a conversation along these lines, you were all for the pain lasting forever."

"There's more at stake than just me and her, now."

She was quiet for a long enough time that he shifted the pillow and canted a look up at her. She had a faint, quizzical look on her face.

"You're worried about Isaac?"

"I'm responsible. He doesn't have anybody else."

She opened her mouth, sat there, whatever words she'd had on the tip of her tongue drying up. Finally she shook her head and said. "Honey, you're 17. You're barely responsible for yourself."

But she didn't understand. She understood family. She understood looking out for her own and for a kid she'd taken under her wing. But she couldn't really comprehend the instinct the wolf in him had to protect _pack._

He didn't want rifts that would cause Isaac to lose the sense of security he'd found here. Because Isaac needed it - - the reassurance of a safe haven that he hadn't known for a very long time. He needed the safety of _pack_. It had taken Scott a long time to feel the call of that instinct - - before it had started to mean more to him than a simple word. But then, he hadn't _needed_ it. He'd had people who loved him, people who would have gone to the mat for him if he'd needed it - - his mom, Stiles, Allison. Isaac had had a dad that locked him in a freezer and left him to scream until this throat bled.

So yeah, he'd messed up. And that part of him that that felt the draw of pack, that felt the need to protect and preserve the sanctity of the people that relied on him was okay with taking a bullet if meant one of _his_ didn't have to.

# # #

When Scott knocked on the door to Isaac's room, Isaac was lying in bed, English lit book propped on his chest, reading the assignment that Scott should have been going over himself. The guest room wasn't a guest room anymore. Isaac hadn't taken a few things from his old house, clothes mostly, a few essentials, but most of it he'd left for the bank to dispose of when they foreclosed on the property. Like he'd just as well forget. But he'd still managed to make it his own.

"Listen," Scott stepped into the room. It was spotless, compared to his own disaster area of a bedroom. As if that was one of those things that had been drilled into Isaac's head before his dad had died - - the notion of everything having a place and being in it.

"Yeah?" Isaac was staring at him, waiting for him to pick up his train of thought.

"What I said before . . . I _will_ be okay with whatever the two of you have. It just might not happen overnight. I'm trying."

Isaac sat up, the book in his lap, canting his head and staring. "Are you actually feeling guilty for feeling hurt?"

With Stiles that question would have been backed by all the sarcasm a human expression could muster. With Isaac it was just candid curiosity. It threw Scott a little off his intended goal. "No . . . not at all."

"You still love her?" Isaac's candid curiosity had nothing on his tendency for brutal bluntness.

Of course werewolf hearing didn't miss a thing and it was a small house. Sometimes you couldn't help but hear things you weren't meant to hear, even if you weren't trying. And Isaac didn't have the boundaries Scott had set up for himself when it came to using his werewolf abilities.

"She's moved on. I need to, too. If you're happy and she's happy, I don't want to get in the way of that. I don't' want there to be a - - _thing_ - - between you, me, her. Not because I'm stuck in a place I can't get out of. I'm not holding grudges, I promise you. You're pack and no matter what, I've got your back."

Pack Isaac would understand.

Isaac was staring at him, intent blue gaze from under half lowered lashes. "What if she hasn't? Moved on?"

Scott blinked at him, the connections between brain and mouth shorting out, Isaac scattering all his well-laid plans with that simple query. He didn't know what to do with it.

"I'm okay with that, you know. I don't mind complication." And when Scott had said it himself, he'd barely believed his own words. When Isaac said it, it was with absolute conviction. "Like you said. Pack."

**Author's Note**

I hadn't exactly planned for this to be a 'romantic' drama and it won't be, I promise, but I did sort of get myself into the heads of a couple of teenagers with relationship issues in the process of looking for a way to ease into the action part of Vendetta slowly.

First and foremost I ship (in a totally bromance sort of way) Scott x Stiles. But since I've opened the can of worms that is Scott x Allison x Isaac, I've got to deal with it. I'm an endgame Scott x Allison girl, so bear with me if I tend to lean in that direction.


	3. Chapter 3

3 

"He said that? That's what he said, exact words?" Stiles maneuvered his way between Scott and Scott's locker, fixing him with a critical eye.

Like most of their tiffs - - well, at least the ones where it was Scott doing the tiffing - - Scott was over it after a good night's sleep. And when Scott had come by to pick him up for school, there'd been that look in his eyes that just screamed there were things going on inside his head that needed sharing. He just didn't know it yet. It had taken Stiles approximately twenty minutes to get him talking and only that long because clinging to Scott on the way to school on the back of a motor cycle that had seen better days, did not good conversation make. Stiles feared for his life every time he got on the back of that thing, but it was better than riding the bus.

"Yeah. Pretty much."

Scott was also not much for giving detailed descriptions, and for a detail oriented guy, trying to get a cohesive story out of him when he wasn't so keen on discussing the subject was maddening.

"What did he mean, he doesn't mind complications?"

"What did he mean when he said maybe she hasn't moved on?" Scott countered, stuffing a few books into his locker and taking another few out.

Of course that was what Scott was stuck in an infinite loop over. Stiles waved a dismissive hand. Scott and Allison were both idiots as far as he was concerned, he just happened to have a lot more investment in Scott, so he was willing to let it slide with him.

"I mean did she say something to him? Why would he say that?"

"How should I know? She's a girl. Her thought processes are specifically designed to confound and mess with ours. I thought you _knew_ this."

"Apparently, I don't know anything," Scott muttered.

"I'm more curious about what _Isaac_ meant," Stiles went on. "I mean, what guy is happy with the girl he's currently doing still being hung up her ex?"

"There's no _doing_," Scott reminded him. "He said they haven't yet, remember?"

"Unless," Stiles didn't let Scott's interjection make him miss a beat as they walked towards first period English Lit. "Unless Isaac's got enough screws loose that he's perfectly cool with being the rebound guy. Or - -"

"He doesn't have loose screws, Stiles."

"Or, he's okay with it because its _you_ and he's got a weird thing for you - - mancrush - - wolfcrush? Whatever - - and maybe he's hoping if he plays his cards right he might get a threesome?"

"Ha. Funny." Scott glared, completely unamused by Stiles' skills at theorizing. "He doesn't have a weird thing for me. He's just a little - -"

"Insecure? Prone to random acts of violence? Obsessive-compulsive?"

"Two out of three of those apply to you, too."

"That's just mean."

Scott huffed out a breath. Frustrated. "It doesn't matter. Because as of today, I'm starting fresh. It's not just them. I can't keep tearing myself up. Right?"

"Whatever you say, buddy." Stiles patted him on the back. It sounded great in theory, but he didn't believe it for a second. Allison had this unwitting destructive power to demolish all of Scott's good intentions

The moment she smiled at him, or got up close enough that he could smell her hair, or God forbid touched him - - all that 'fresh start' bull would become structurally unsound and cracks would begin to form in the foundation of Scott's newfound conviction. But who knew, he could be wrong.

And speak of the wrecking ball herself - - Allison and Lydia were in the hall outside English Lit, chatting. They looked up as he and Scott approached, and the first thing Allison did - - of course - - was open her mouth and look like she was about to say something to Scott. Stiles latched hold of Scott's elbow and steered him forcibly past them and into the classroom.

Scott tossed him an irritated look once he'd dropped into his seat, and leaned over and complained. "I said I was starting fresh, not avoiding her altogether."

"Dude. Baby steps."

They both glanced up as Isaac slunk past, heading towards a seat in the back, but it was his usual slink, blithely unconcerned. He half nodded at Scott, ignoring Stiles completely. It was just unnatural for him to be so cool about the whole thing when Scott, who'd gotten pretty good this year at taking things in stride, was practically crawling out of his skin. But then, Scott had a few other nerve-wracking issues he was recovering from so a lot of his agitation was maybe bleed over.

Then he got distracted by Lydia, who had on a long sleeved, short hemmed knit dress that did everything in its power to flatter her curves. When she took her jacket off and he got the full effect, he slouched deeper into his seat and sighed.

She was wearing his Christmas present. He noticed it after a few distracted seconds of staring at her legs.

"Nice boots," he leaned over and remarked.

Lydia glanced his way across the aisle, tilted a foot adorned in a high-heeled ankle boot and shrugged. "They're okay. For knockoffs."

"Yeah, well. I won't tell if you won't."

Her mouth curved.

This semester's English Lit teacher was considerably less dangerous than last semester's had ended up being. A substitute who looked as if being called in full time to fill an empty spot was the bane of his existence. His teaching methods were predictable and boring. As evidenced by the standardized discussion and mini thesis he made them write of the reading they'd done last night. It sucked that the most interesting teachers generally turned out to the psychotic ones.

They got through a mind-numbing discussion of what was supposed to be a modern classic but really seemed more like a torture device for high school students everywhere. Stiles got creatively off track in his mini-thesis, then followed Lydia out into the hall after the bell rang and released them all from literary hell.

"No death dreams," she said before he could open his mouth to broach a topic that had nothing whatsoever to do with that, thank you very much.

"I wasn't gonna ask," he defended himself. Though he was secretly glad that she hadn't had any morbid nightmares involving his impending death. He glanced over her head at Allison and Isaac heading one way down the hall and Scott stopping to talk to Danny in the other direction.

"So, is Allison officially dating Isaac now?"

Lydia lifted a brow, casting him a half glance as he followed her down the hall. "Allison's not dating anyone. You don't have to date to have a good time, you know. Terms like 'dating' and 'boyfriend' and 'relationship' can be so restricting."

"Right. So what's the unrestrictive terminology?"

"Having a good time. I thought I said that."

"Like you're having with Aiden? What is it about wolves, huh? Its like normal, non-monstery guys don't even stand a chance."

This time she stopped and gave him a full on look. For a beat she stared at him, then leaned in and said. "It's the stamina. Stamina matters. And as far as stamina goes, werewolves are very, very good."

He stared at her in horror, his mind going to places that it really didn't need to visit. "Oh god. You so did not need to share that bit of information. My brain's bleeding."

"Then stop asking questions you don't want the answers to." She smiled like the proverbial cat and flounced into her next class.

He stood there staring after her for a moment, until an oversized body interjected itself between him and his view of Lydia's backside. Aiden grinned at him, showing just a little hint of sharpened canines. Just a little bit of proprietary threat going on there, if Stiles was any judge. He wondered if Aiden's ideas about 'relationships' and Lydia's ran along the same lines.

"What? You got a problem?" Stiles couldn't stop his mouth from spouting bravado his body in no way could back up.

Aiden's grin widened, amused. He turned without replying and followed Lydia into the class. Stiles simmered for a moment, before heading for his own next period.

So went the day.

"Allison talked to me," Scott said matter of factly when he sat down across from Stiles at lunch.

Stiles bugged his eyes and zapped Scott with a look that didn't need words to express his volume of frustration.

"All she wanted was to say," Scott cut him off before he could start with the words to go with the look. "Was that she was sorry for biting my head off yesterday."

"And?"

"And what? I said I understood."

"And you didn't feel the need to bring up what Isaac said?"

Scott gave him a _'don't take me for an idiot'_ look and Stiles returned it with a _'don't constantly give me reason to'_ lift of the eyebrow.

Scott stabbed a piece of Salisbury steak with his fork and said huffily. "No. I didn't bring up what Isaac said."

"But you wanted to, didn't you?"

Scott chewed diligently on the gristly piece of rubber that the school cafeteria tried to pass off as meat, then finally relented. "Yeah. I wanted to. But I won't. Unless she does first."

"Really? That's your line in the sand?"

"I don't know why I eat lunch with you."

"Because I'm cheaper than counseling and I don't make you interpret Rorschach cards."

"Ha."

Scott dropped him off at home before heading to work at the animal clinic. It had taken one day of warmer temperatures to melt most of the snow away, leaving everything sort of soggy and brown underneath. He dragged the empty trashcans from the curb and back around behind the house, then went inside to rustle up a snack. There was a message on the machine with the stellar news that his Jeep was ready. His dad had made arrangements with an old friend who owned a scrap yard and did repair work on the side for cheap. The damage hadn't been quite so bad as he'd been led to believe by Dupont. Mostly body work that could be banged out or replaced with used parts.

He did a little celebratory fist pump, then called his dad to see if he could get off work early enough to take him by the scrap yard to pick it up. He couldn't be back among the vehicularly mobile soon enough.

It looked like the new year was starting off with an up note after all.

# # #

"Dad, I'm home," Allison called out experimentally after she'd unlocked the door of the condominium she presently called home. Isaac lingered behind her, both of them listening for the response that would either have them going over homework in the living room - - her father's preference for when she brought home boys with tendencies towards lycanthropy - - or well, any boys really, but especially the former - - or if it was safe to venture into her bedroom undisturbed.

There was no answer, and Isaac sort of shrugged and said, 'Nobody's home,' and you learned very quickly to trust werewolf senses in things like this. Her dad was only marginally more okay with Isaac coming over at all, than he had been with Scott. But that might have been because his worldview had shifted somewhat insofar as werewolves were concerned. Not a lot, but a little. It might have also been because he hadn't ever actually caught her in the act of 'making out' with Isaac, and wasn't carrying that mental image around in his head every time he saw him.

Her dad was endearingly, frustratingly protective in some things. It tended to keep her boyfriends on their toes. Not that she'd had a lot of actual boyfriends. It had been hard developing lasting relationships when she'd barely ever stayed in one place long enough to form them. And when you had to sever ties of the heart - even casual ones - it hurt.

"Do you want a soda?" she asked.

"Sure."

She grabbed a couple of cans from the refrigerator and joined him in her room. It was the first time he'd been over in almost a week.  
Partly because Scott had been freaking out a little bit, spurred by his own experiences and her father's grim knowledge of the man who'd been hunting him, and Isaac's inner wolf had been damned and determined to stick close by. Partly because of that _other_ thing - - the guilt Stiles had stirred with his little chat.

He was sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed, flipping through the chem. Lab assignment booklet with a furrow between his brows. She could have gotten a guaranteed A if she'd partnered up with Lydia, but then Lydia didn't give foot rubs that made her toes curl and her eyes roll back in bliss. Isaac gave exceptional foot jobs.

She sat down next to him, thigh pressed against his, and peered down at the assignment. "Ph in acid based reactions. Fun."

"I can think of better ways to have fun," His nostrils flared a little, scenting her. He was just a little more 'wolf' than Scott had ever been. A little more primal in some things. An odd juxtaposition of careless confidence and desperate need for approval. It was adorable.

She canted her head to smile up at him. "Really? Better than Chemistry homework?"

He slipped his hand into her hair, nuzzling her jaw. The rasp of his tongue felt electric. She let him push her backwards, sideways across the bed

"I'm glad you're okay. You avoiding me all week had me worried."

"I'm okay. I talked with Scott." His hand traveled up her hip, fingers grazing the skin under her shirt.

"_You_ talked with Scott?" She turned her head a little, avoiding his mouth so she could get the question out.

"He talked to me." Isaac mumbled, happy enough with his mouth in the juncture of her neck.

She pushed herself up to her elbows, dislodging him. "About me?"

He sighed, rolling to one side, leaning on an elbow himself. "Yeah."

She leveled a look, wanting more information.

He shrugged. "He said he's cool with it. Mostly. He still loves you."

She opened her mouth, this weird patter of panic fluttering in her stomach, so caught off guard by that coming out of his mouth that she didn't know quite what to say.

She smiled, finally trying to brush it away. "There's a difference between 'love' and 'in-love', you know?"

He shrugged again. "Okay. If you say so. But I'm all right with it, either way."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, that you're not over him either."

She sat up. "I've been over him for a long time."

"That's not what I pick up when you get close to him."

"What you pick up?" She narrowed her eyes, dissecting Isaac's casual words for actual meaning. "Scent? Are you talking about something you're scenting? Like pheromones?"

He nodded and she felt her face redden, half embarrassment, half annoyance. She couldn't be attracted to normal guys. No, she found herself in the company of ones who could hear the sound of her heart from a half-mile away, and pick up the scent of her shampoo before she'd even gotten halfway through the school parking lot. Of course a little chemical excretion was no big deal.

And maybe when she got close to Scott she could help but _feel_ things. A lot of things that made her heart beat a little faster and her mouth go dry. But then what you wanted and what was good for you weren't always the same thing.

"What do you smell when I'm with you," she asked tightly.

"Same thing. Sometimes."

He wasn't being cooperative and she felt the distinct urge to shove him off the bed.

"What do I smell like now?"

He tilted his head, considering. Then ventured. "Pissed off?"

"You think?"

"It doesn't bother me. I told him the same thing."

She clenched her fists. She had to force a few deep breaths to keep from doing something emotional and embarrassing.

"So how much detail did you two talk about this?"

"Not much. He's trying not to think about it."

"Really? And why do you feel the need to be so accommodating? Is it because he's your alpha?" She felt an irrational spike of spite and came through in her tone. But either Isaac didn't notice or didn't care.

"He doesn't think that way, you know."

"But you do."

"Yeah. Just because he doesn't like to admit it, doesn't mean it isn't true."

She pulled the chemistry lab booklet onto her lap, flustered and annoyed. Her hands were shaking just the tiniest bit and she didn't know why. Maybe because Isaac bringing up Scott in the midst of 'fooling around' was simply a pretty effective mood killer.

Isaac sighed and sat up. "So I guess we're doing homework?"

"I guess we are."

# # #

Scott had been barely out the door from work and heading towards his bike, when he got the text from Stiles.

_'Jeep's fixed. Dad's on a call. Shop closes at 8. Pick me up. PLZ!_'

Which was how he ended up in a dark junkyard filled with the shadowy figures of mangled vehicles, listening to Stiles bitch about the array of mismatched colors now adorning his jeep. The driver's side door was a faded, much scuffed red and the front side panel an olive green to go with the original blue.

"They couldn't have slapped a coat of paint on?"

The old man who ran the junkyard spat out a glop of pungent chewing tobacco at Stiles feet. The tobacco didn't smell nearly as badly as the grease smeared old mechanic. "You daddy said fix her cheap. I fixed her cheap. Go buy a can of spray paint if you want her painted up pretty."

Stiles made a disgusted face and stepped back. Scott was trying to breathe through his mouth.

"It drives. Your dad paid for it. Stop complaining. He pulled Stiles by the arm away from the old man, who'd had enough of them wasting his time and started ambling back towards the shed that served as his office.

Stiles grumbled a little, but finally relented. "Yeah. I guess. I owe you for bringing me out here."

"Its okay. My first time at a junkyard. It's a learning experience." He waved a hand at the stacks of skeletal car frames.

Stiles grinned at him. "Well damn, you're a cheap date. Let me put at least a little effort into it and spring for pizza."

"In celebration of you having a car again?"

"In celebration of the chances of me dying going drastically down now that I don't have to ride with you to school anymore."

Scott rolled his eyes and suggested. "Magianno's?"

"Meet you there."

Magianno's was in a little strip mall halfway between the suburbs and downtown Beacon Hills. It was close enough to the School that it was a popular high school gathering spot. Coach religiously brought the team here after every home game, win or lose. It didn't hurt that the prices were cheap and the food good.

On a Wednesday night, it was running a little slow, not many patrons, but the smells coming from the kitchen were mouth watering and Scott hadn't eaten since lunch. When they walked inside, they saw Ethan and Danny Mahealani sitting in the back. Stiles immediately gravitated that way, mindless of what he might be intruding upon. But Danny and Ethan seemed genuinely unfazed by the interruption of whatever conversation they'd been in the midst of, when Stiles slipped into the seat across from them.

"Hey guys, what's up? You ordered yet?"

Scott slid in next to Stiles. They had ordered, so Stiles held up an arm to catch the attention of the waitress and called for her to double it.

"I got my Jeep back," Stiles informed them, since practically everyone in school who Stiles had a speaking relationship with had heard about his misery of being without for all of two weeks now.

"That's great. Maybe you should drive safer." Danny, who wasn't in the know about the details of the last 'accident', suggested good-naturedly.

Scott could see Stiles visibly vibrating with the effort to contain the urge to explain in detail that his driving skills or lack thereof had had nothing whatsoever to do with his Jeep getting beat to hell. At least not this last time.

"Yeah, maybe I'll try that this time around, Danny. Avoiding big, furry accidents and all." Was what Stiles finally managed to choke out on a wave of sarcastic frustration.

Danny furrowed his brows, not quite getting that, and Scott kicked Stiles' ankle under the table, then changed the subject. "So you know any of the guys trying out this year?"

"A few," Danny glanced at Ethan with a half smile. "I'm trying to convince Ethan to try out, but he's being stubborn."

Ethan shrugged, one long arm stretched out behind Danny on the back of the seat. "I'm good watching you from the sidelines. Besides, if I tried out, Aiden would too, and he can get a little _too_ competitive."

Which precaution Scott could understand all too well. It was all he could do to keep Isaac from getting out of hand when his blood was up on the field. Worrying about a bigger, more testosterone filled wolf on the team was not a pressure he needed added to his list.

Stiles snorted. "Is that what you call it? I call it being a dick."

Ethan lifted a brow, not offended by that assessment of his brother. Probably well aware of it. But then Ethan was a lot more agreeable than his twin.

It was close after nine by the time they finished up and parted ways, everyone happily stuffed with pizza. He had an English reading assignment to do when he got home, as well as chemistry lab homework, which was going to make for a late night.

"Did you already read that chapter for Mr. Deeds?"

"Yeah, you're gonna hate it," Stiles predicted, in the process of digging keys from his pocket. "See you tomorrow."

He sighed, heading towards his bike, then stopped, a ripple of unease shivering across the back of his neck.

"What?" Stiles asked, poised with one foot in the jeep, one on the ground, staring through the open door at Scott.

It wasn't anything he heard or scented, just an almost palpable disquiet that made him turn and scan the dark strip mall parking lot. And there was nothing there. Just a few empty cars under the one dim lamp pole that actually had a working bulb.

"I dunno. Nothing." He shook his head, trying to shrug it off. All last week he'd been jumping at shadows, so it wasn't an unfamiliar feeling and it was gone now, fading away with the goose pimples it had raised.

Stiles stared at him a moment, narrow eyed, his gaze flitting across the parking lot, tracing the path Scott's had gone.

"'I dunno/nothing' is the sort of answer that makes me crazy," he finally said, a little dryly. Scott's recent issues with anxiety had nothing on Stiles' bouts with it.

"Yeah. I know. Sorry. I'll see you tomorrow at school."


	4. Chapter 4

4

Scott overslept. He figured it out when his mom threw a pillow at his head and startled him out of a perfectly horrible nightmare concerning an endless hall full of classrooms with no numbers on the doors and himself late for some extraordinarily important test and no idea where to go to take it.

He bolted upright, breathing hard, and blinked up at him mom's exasperated face peering down at him.

"I thought you'd left with Isaac. You're going to be late." She was in scrubs, her hair in a messy tail at the back of her neck, looking just a little frazzled, as if she was running a little late for work herself.

He cast a hasty glance at the clock beside the bed. 8:32, which meant he had exactly 28 minutes to make the first period bell.

"Crap," he muttered, throwing off the covers and making a dash for the bathroom.

"How late were you up?" she called after him through the bathroom door.

Pretty damned late, trying to finish four chapters of the most God-awful boring literature known to man. "I was doing homework, mom."

Which was both a truthful excuse and one she couldn't argue with. He took a four-minute shower and pulled on the first pair of jeans he found lying around. The jersey might have been moderately clean but drastically late beggars couldn't be choosers. He was pulling on his jacket and shrugging on his backpack when he breezed through the kitchen. Fifteen minutes. He could make that.

His mom handed him a piece of only slightly burned toast on his way past.

"Thanks, mom." He stuffed half of it into his mouth and grabbed his helmet off the stool by the backdoor.

"Don't kill yourself trying to get there on time, honey," she called after him as he bolted outside.

It was a gray morning. Sort of overcast, but not cold enough for more than rain if the sky let loose, which it probably would right around the time Coach gathered them all out on the field after school for the first round of tryouts. Coach wouldn't care. He was all for 'making men' out of his players and a little nasty weather only deterred _'girls and little boys'_. Coach was all about the tough love.

He was on the long stretch of Rt. 17 when he saw the car off the side of the road. A grey, late model coupe with a flattened rear tire. He would have passed on by, save for the girl that stepped into the road, waving a hand with a makeshift, blood soaked bandage. Even going fifty, he could smell the blood in the air before he got a good enough look to see it on the t-shirt she'd wrapped around her hand.

He pulled up next to her, one foot on the ground, bike idling.

"You okay?"

She moved up, a smile of relief on her face. Pretty girl, with short brown hair and bright blue eyes. A little older than him maybe. There was something about her that was vaguely familiar.

"Other than being stupid and not knowing how to use a jack?" she waved the bandaged hand. "It slipped when I was trying to jack the car up. I feel like such a girl for not being able to change a flat tire."

"Its okay. My mom's never figured it out either. Have you got somebody coming?"

"I wish. I forgot to charge my phone, too. It's been a bad morning." She offered an embarrassed smile. "I hate to ask - - but would you mind giving a girl a hand?"

What was one tardy in a brand new semester? He had a whole clean slate to start making black marks on. He rolled the bike onto the side of the road, hung his helmet from the handle and went to take a look at her flat.

"Do you go to Beacon Hills?" He asked her, squatting down to position the jack under the car.

"High school?" she laughed, hugging herself under her coat. "Are you just flirting with me, or do I look that young?"

He grinned up at her. "You just look sort of familiar."

"We did meet once," she said as he was loosening bolts. "I was making espresso."

He looked back at her, and the tip of the stun baton in her hand caught him in the side of the neck. It felt like a hundred million volts of white fire injected directly into his spine. His muscles contracted, slamming him forward, into the car. She followed him down with it, hitting him again in the chest and it was like his heart was about to explode; like a thousand little electrified fishhooks trying to tear through his skin.

He went down, spasming in the gravel, sight going black and charred around the edges. Through tunneling vision he saw her standing over him, the long black baton sizzling with live current. She pulled a phone out of her pocket and hit a number, barely waiting a beat before someone answered and she said.

"He's down. Come pick him up."

She looked down at him, canting her head, expressionless. Then she touched the live end of the baton to his chest again and everything ran screaming into black.

# # #

It was five minutes past the first bell and Scott hadn't shown up to class. Stiles figured he'd had a late night battling through mid-century American literature and was probably running late. Mr. Deeds was only barely aware of the existence of students in his class, so the tardiness might have escaped notice if Scott had slipped in with a good enough excuse, save for the fact that the sub had decided to show a little spontaneity and surprised them with a pop quiz. He sent a surreptitious text, warning of just that.

Ten minutes in and Stiles began tapping a pencil on the desk top, focus divided between the paper in front of him, his quietly dormant phone, and the door.

He sent another text.

Five more minutes and he couldn't concentrate on the words on the paper because he was too busy being annoyed at Scott's inability to answer a simple text.

_Where the hll are U? Answr my damn txts._

He hit send and sat there, glaring at the phone perched on his thigh, willing it to vibrate. Five more minutes and agitation turned to anxiety, because that's how his mind worked. Anything less than instantaneous resolution and his nerves started to thrum. He couldn't help it. And with anxiety came the too vivid ability to whip up creatively morbid scenarios in his head. He remembered last night and that spooked look on Scott's face in the parking lot, before he'd tried to brush it off. Like he'd caught wind of something that had freaked him out a little. And it had barely been two weeks since they'd had a fracking psychopath trying to hunt them down and they'd been walking around the last few days like it had never happened. He wanted to pull at his hair.

He sent another text instead.

He was a writhing mass of nerves by the time the bell rang. God knew what he'd written on the quiz, but he tossed it on the teacher's desk regardless and stomped out into the hall amidst the rush of other students, phone already at his ear. It rang until Scott's voice mail picked up and Stiles hissed and snapped.

"Where the hell are you, dickhead? Answer your damn phone."

He stalked ten paces down the hall, then stopped, turning against the tide and shoving his way back down towards the doors at the end of the hall.

Somebody caught his arm, and he almost shrugged the hand off, but peripheral vision recognized red hair and big green eyes and he let her stop his forward momentum.

"What's wrong?" Lydia asked bluntly, staring up at him, a little furrow of concern between her brows.

"I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe he just forgot to charge his phone. Maybe I need a Xanax. Who the hell knows?"

The furrow deepened. "Who?"

He shook his head and flung out the arm with the cell. "I'm on edge. I'm really on edge - - after what happened - -"

"Scott?" She guessed when his answer skirted around the question she'd actually asked.

"He didn't show up to class."

"Maybe he's sick."

He gave her a look. "He doesn't _get_ sick."

"Oh. Right."

He started walking again, through the thinning migration of kids rushing to get to second period before the bell rang. Second period wasn't a priority for him at the moment. He went through the doors leading out to the back parking lot and tried Scott's number again.

Predictably it went to voice mail. "So help me god, you better be lying on the side of the road somewhere, because if you're not answering my calls and you're not, I will fucking find a way to kill your werewolf ass."

"That sounds like the sort of message an angry mom would leave. Aside from the cursing and the death threats."

He started, not even realizing Lydia had followed him out. She stood there staring at him calmly, one hand clutching the strap of her purse and just looking at her made him ease back enough to remember to breathe.

"Maybe he had something to do - - maybe something came up." She suggested.

"He'd have told me." Stiles nixed that notion.

She gave him a skeptical look. "He runs everything by you first, does he?"

"Generally," he sniffed, then looked up as the side doors swung open and spilled out Isaac, with Allison on his heels.

"Oh, now it's a party." Stiles let out a breath of frustration.

"What's wrong?" Allison said. "Isaac heard you freaking out."

Of course he had. Fracking werewolf hearing. "What do you mean 'what's wrong?' You might not have noticed, but Scott didn't show up for school today. Wait a minute," he stabbed a finger at Isaac. "He did make it home last night, didn't he?"

Isaac nodded, a wary look in his eyes. "He got home. He was home when I left this morning."

"Stiles - - he's late for school, he's not returning texts - - that doesn't necessarily mean he's in trouble," Allison reasoned. "It's Scott, sometimes returning phone calls isn't his number one priority."

"Right. This from the girl whose dad told us horror stories about the sonuvabitch who was hunting us never giving up a chase. This, from _that_ girl. I've got a _feeling_, Goddamnit."

Then he had a thought and spun on Lydia. "Have _you_ had any feelings?"

She shook her head. "No. I'm sorry."

Stiles hissed through his teeth. Though he supposed Lydia not having death premonitions was a good thing.

Isaac was pacing behind them like a wolf in a cage, curling his fingers in and out of fists, and it was making Stiles' nervous tension jump into hyerdrive.

"Isaac," Allison snapped, maybe starting to get caught up in the epidemic of nerves herself. "You're not helping."

He looked up at her like a dog caught gnawing on the leg of the coffee table. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. Sorry. Call his mom. Maybe it's something simple. Maybe she had car trouble. Maybe Deaton had an emergency and needed his help. Just call."

The only problem was, nothing in their lives was ever simple anymore.

# # #

Scott came to with his face against musty, straw covered dirt. A tremor pulsed through him, muscles still shivering in ghost reaction to the massive dose of electricity. So either he hadn't been out that long or she'd been zapping him regularly to keep him down.

The girl. The face registered dimly now. A girl he'd seen in passing at Dupont's lodge. One of his staff.

Dupont.

He smelled the faint sweet scent tobacco amidst the musty scents of straw and mold, old manure and rust. The scent of men. And more frightening yet, the familiar, oddly subdued scent of the beast Dupont had set on Stiles and him. All this came to him on the heels of one indrawn breath. Panic set in on the next.

He rolled to his side, but his arms wouldn't cooperate, pinned behind his back, metal biting into his wrists. Not the give of handcuff chains, but something solid and rigid. He came to a crouch regardless, just with a little less grace and stared into the shadows of what looked to be a cavernous old barn. There were men in those shadows, he couldn't see how many, but he heard the sound of their breath, the shifting of their bodies, the shifting of weapons as they tensed. He saw the flare of a match, the cherry heat of the tip of a cigar being lit, and zeroed in on one man leaning against a stack of battered crates.

Julian Dupont, with his long, scarred face, his prematurely silver hair and the dead eyes of a man who killed for pleasure. Scott growled, anger and fear bringing out the fangs, straining against the metal that held his wrists. Dupont canted his head, slipped his hand into his pocket and brought out what looked like a small black remote and from one second, to the next Scott's blood started eating its way through his veins.

He doubled over, choking on a garbled scream, tasting blood in his mouth, blood in his eyes, acid burning through body, unbearable pain spiraling out from the throbbing pulse at his throat. Melting him from the inside out. He'd barely been cognizant of the prick that had preceded the immediate agonizing torment. It was worse than the electric shock. Worse than anything he'd ever felt, that he'd ever imagined he could feel. Passing out wasn't a viable option for escape, because it followed him into wavering darkness.

He was shuddering when he swam back into consciousness, curled in a knot on the dirt floor, blood thudding thinly, desperate for a foothold, behind his temples, everything hazy and grey around the edges. He was aware now of the weight encircling his throat. The warm touch of the metal band around his neck. The collar.

Julian Dupont crouched beside him, elbows on knees, the fingers of one hand idly turning the small remote. "A hard lesson to learn, I know. But I trust you understand now?"

Scott glared up at him, blinking back wetness that he hoped was tears and not copiously flowing blood. "You bastard - -"

The pain hit again, before he could quite get the word out of his mouth. He arched off the ground with it, screaming. It didn't last as long this time, and Dupont gave him time to recover enough to actually see, before he repeated. "I _trust_ you understand?"

"Yes," he gasped. His throat felt like shredded meat. Bloody and raw.

"It's a form of hydrochloric acid mixed with certain natural substances designed to maximize the effect. The ingredients vary, depending upon the species. It is actually eating away at your insides with each dosage - - a human being wouldn't survive the first hit of it - - but your body repairs the damage almost as quickly as it occurs. A strong enough dose, injected at the back of the neck might prove lethal if it ate through your spinal column entirely, but hopefully we won't need to administer that. I find it a particularly effective method of training. Wouldn't you agree, Scott?"

He glared up, clenching his jaw to stop the trembling. The pain was still there, that reedy feeling of bleeding internally, but he could also feel the healing, the gradual lessoning of the hurt.

This man wanted him dead. Wanted to finish the hunt he'd started. He didn't know if this little torture session was part of the game or if Dupont was just a vindictive prick. Either way, it sucked for him.

"I thought you wanted to hunt me, not train me," he ground out.

Dupont laughed, rising, circling. He took a drag off the cigar and blew out a long stream of smoke.

"Oh, I do. But in the process of finding you, I made a few inquiries of people in the know with the Wolf community. And the wolves do love their rumors. There are whispers afloat, curious whispers that have the old families a bit riled."

He leaned down, grasping the collar of Scott's jacket and dragging him up to his knees. It was hard to maintain even that kneeling position, when his muscles still felt like jelly. Dupont crouched in front of him, fist curled in the edge of his jacket, leaning in close enough that he could feel the heat of his breath on his face.

"Whispers of a true alpha," Dupont said. "The first in a dozen generations of you beasts - - but a made wolf and not a born one - - which understandably might piss off a few purists of the old bloodlines. Rarest of the rare, regardless. You might even say a collector's item that would be worth, to the right buyer a considerable fortune. You can't imagine the pleasure of hunting down and ending something that exists nowhere else on earth. And to think I almost killed you out of hand."

If he lunged now, when the bastard was so close, he could rip his throat out. It wouldn't even take that much strength. Just good aim and desperate need. It might even be worth it, even if the others killed him in the process. And maybe Dupont saw it in his eyes. Maybe his hatred of the sick son of a bitch was so intense that he had no more control over the flash of red in his eyes than he did over the beat of his heart.

Dupont canted his head, smiling, and acid poured into Scott's veins through the collar, rupturing vessels, burning him up from the inside out. He screamed past the blood in his throat and writhed, until his body slowly started the cycle of repairing the damage all over again. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the low rumbling growls of something within the depths of the barn. The clink of claws against metal as a large body shifted restlessly.

He pressed his face against the moldy straw, sobbing, desperately trying to draw in breath through the fire lancing his throat. Dupont lifted a brow, unimpressed, as if the infliction of pain meant as little to him as the lighting of a cigar.

Someone moved up next to him, almost as tall, same silver hair. His sister. When she stared down at him, her eyes were as dispassionate as her brothers. Colder perhaps. "I know you like your entertainments, Julian, but better to recoup what we've lost and there are offers already."

Dupont lifted a brow. "See? Word travels fast in certain circles, when the item in question is singularly unique. We'll wait a bit. Let the interest build. And I've only just acquired him, sister. Let me have my entertainments."

Her mouth pursed, annoyed. The movement of her hand drew Scott's eye to the long black shape of the dormant stun baton as she tapped it against her leg.

He rolled to his side, managed to get himself to his knees, the quiver in his gut having nothing to do with any pain inflicted by them this time. It was fear. He swallowed and it tasted like blood. But the rawness of his throat had eased, so it was residual.

"There are people who are going to be looking for me." Please, God, let them miss him soon enough to start looking.

"The Argents?" Dupont lifted a brow. "Yes, that was a surprising ally to come to the rescue of a wolf. But the word I hear, is that this arm of the Argent family tree had fallen from grace. They don't have the power of the family to back them up anymore. So it's just a man and a barely trained girl. And though Chris Argent is a foe to never take lightly," Dupont waved an arm at the shadowed figures of his men. "I believe I have him outgunned."

"What about the other boy?" Jan Dupont asked. "He's seen our faces and I don't like loose ends."

Dupont waved a hand. "I leave him to your tender mercies, my dear. I trust you to take care of it."

"No," Scott screamed and the lingering pain and the weakness wasn't enough to keep him from launching himself at the silver haired bastard. He heard the answering roar of something in the depths of the barn, the rattle of bars on a cage, then Jan hit him with the stun baton as she threw herself out of his way. He still hit, Dupont, full-on wolf, fighting off the pulsating surge of shock that wanted to freeze up his muscles, going for the jugular.

The dozen needles jabbing him in the neck, releasing their poison into his blood were a better deterrent. That took him down and kept him down, even his desperate rage eroded away by the excruciating pain of the acid.

Dupont shoved him off, angry enough that he'd gotten within an inch of teeth to throat, that he drove a boot into Scott's side once he'd gained his feet. It was a dull pain at best, compared to the other.

"Don't - - don't. He's not a threat - - I swear - he's not a threat." He choked the words out and blood came with them, soaking into the straw under his cheek.

Dupont made no reply, just nodded tersely to his sister, who turned on her heel and strode off. Dupont made a motion then, and two of his men melted out of the shadows, hauling Scott up between them. He tried to get his feet under him, but his legs were still rubbery from the electric shock. He made more of an effort when they dragged him towards the shadows at the back of the barn and the scent of the vanago became stronger. There was a large cage in the darkness, half draped by canvas. Something huge shifted in the depths of it, issuing low, rumbling growls. There was another, smaller cage next to it, big enough for a large dog, or a man. He'd been in one like it before, courtesy of Dupont. He still had nightmares of that cage and the helpless shame of being caged like an animal.

He dug in his heels, frantic. One of them cuffed him with the butt of a gun for the resistance. They thrust him inside and slammed the gate. Dupont locked it himself.

"Remember the last cage? This one will put you down in an instant the moment you test its integrity.

He stared up at Dupont, gathering calm, gathering what reserves he had left. "Whatever you want - -I'll do. Just don't hurt my friends. You don't have to hurt anybody else."

Dupont canted his head, amused. "What I want from you, does not require your cooperation."

For a moment, Dupont's gaze flickered to the larger cage, but the thing in its depths made no move, made no sound save for the rumbling whisper of its breath. Then he turned and left and his men followed in his wake. Two of them stayed, positioning themselves near the big barn doors. The rest of them drifted out after Dupont.

Scott shut his eyes, breathing deep, aware - - oh so very aware of the weight of the collar around his neck. If the cage was humiliating, the collar was doubly so. He shifted, trying to find a position that didn't make his shoulders ache quite so badly. His hands were close to numb, his palms wet from blood trickling down from where the manacles had sliced into his wrists. Healed now, but the next time he tried them, he'd make new wounds. He wasn't sure he could break them if he tried without the leverage to back up the effort. He tried again anyway, straining muscles that were still rubbery from the shock and the poison, against hard edged steel until the metal cut his wrists to the bone. The blood flowed hot and wet down his h ands, but the manacles didn't give. He leaned his head back against the bars and silently wept. Good for no one, not even himself.

The thing in the other cage moved and he froze. It slunk forward, past the canvas draped across the back of its cage, this huge, slope backed shape with fur black as ink and small, gleaming golden eyes. From a distance, it might have been mistaken for a bear, but close up, the inconsistencies were obvious. The length of the claws, the way the limbs bent. The shape of the jaws, longer and more deadly than any grub eating black bear. The last time he'd seen it, he'd been clinging to its back, digging his claws into its massive neck while Stiles had been riddling it with bullets. He'd thought they'd killed it. Apparently its ability to heal was no less miraculous than his own.

It sank down, eyes fixed on him, gums pulling back in a purring snarl to reveal teeth the length of his fingers. Around its thick neck was a collar - - one he'd noted before. He imagined it worked on very much the same principle as the one he'd been fitted with.

"It sucks, huh?" he said softly.

It kept staring at him, nostrils flaring, as if it were speculating what he'd taste like.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed, but someone was sure to have noticed he wasn't where he was supposed to be by now. Stiles would know something was wrong when he didn't show up for school and wasn't answering his phone. Please, please, please let him go to someone for help better suited for dealing with trouble than he was. Let those someone's be around when Dupont's sister made a try for him, because Scott had the feeling the chances of him getting out of this on his own and helping himself, were slim to non-existent. Like the Argent's, Dupont knew how to contain prey.

He stared at the beast across from him and whispered brutal honesty. "I'll kill him, if I get the chance."

It offered no response, but for one brief moment, something flickered in its eyes, a shift from slit pupiled gold to white rimmed green, before they shifted back. Human eyes. Then it pushed itself up and skulked back to the depths of its cage, leaving him alone in the shadows.


	5. Chapter 5

5

The only thing they accomplished by calling Scott's mom was to totally freak her out. No matter how carefully you phrased it, being called up and asked if she happened to know where her son was, when he was damned well supposed to be at school, had in fact been on his way to school the last she'd seen him, did not a happy mom make.

Deaton, likewise hadn't heard from Scott. Which pretty much exhausted the 'simple explanation' scenario that Allison had proposed. Of course Stiles had known it wouldn't pan out. He felt it in his gut, that queasy feeling that came hand in hand with dire shit either about to, or already having hit the fan.

So they headed to Scott's house, skipping school the least of their concerns, in the hopes of retracing his route and maybe lucking out and having Isaac pick up his scent.

Lydia stayed at school, just in case he did show up and proved them all guilty of way too active, way too morbid imaginations. They took Stiles' Jeep and started tracing the path he knew Scott would have taken, going slow enough, trying to spot anything along the way, trying to give Isaac the best chance possible of picking up the trace of a trail.

They'd gotten out to the long stretch of Rt. 17 with nothing but forest lining road, when Isaac told Stiles to stop.

"I lost it," he said, frowning. "I had it - - but it stopped somewhere along here."

Stiles pulled off to the side of the road and they got out, walking back along the gravely roadside, until Isaac stopped in his tracks, head up, nostrils flaring as he picked up things Stiles and Allison couldn't hope to perceive.

"Here. He was right here and his scent just stops."

"What do you mean stops?" Stiles demanded. "How does it just stop? Try harder."

Isaac cast him a sullen look. "I am trying. He was on a bike. I can track him on a bike. Maybe he wasn't on the bike anymore."

"If it were me," Allison said softly, staring into the forest beyond the thirty yards or so of thicket off the side of the road. "And I were hunting him - - if I were looking to set up an ambush along his route to school. This is the place I'd choose to do it."

They both stared at her, at her quiet, calm assessment of the mental workings of the professional hunter. And she was right. There was nothing but trees for as far as the eye could see in either direction. A nice private place for a kidnapping or a killing.

The queasiness in Stiles' gut churned up a notch. He tasted a little bile at the back of his throat. He made himself breathe, spent a few precious seconds concentrating on simply drawing air into his lungs to keep the raving panic at bay.

"What if he's already dead?" he had to voice it. It would be naïve of them not to consider it. And it was so very possible, if it was Dupont finally come to finish up his failed hunt.

"Then we hunt down the people that did it and we kill them." Isaac growled.

"He's not dead." Allison said. She fixed the both of them with determined brown eyes and repeated it. "He is _not_ dead."

Isaac just stared at her, clenching and unclenching his fists. The claws were out. Stiles felt a wash of camaraderie towards Isaac for those shared nerves when Allison with her hunter face on, cool and determined and too Goddamned calm, made him feel like a panicky _girl_.

"Yeah, well - - if we don't find him - - it might not be too long before he is."

They searched about the area, him and Allison checking the roadside and the tall grass between it and the trees, while Isaac ventured into the woods themselves, searching for any trace of a scent. Cars passed sporadically, curious faces peering out windows at a couple of teenagers scouring the roadside. None of them warranted his notice, until the tan squad car with the Beacon Hills sheriff department logo on its side slowed to a stop behind his Jeep.

Then he looked up and groaned, as his dad got out and beckoned with a strident jerk of his hand. Stiles looked at Allison a few dozen feet away and they both started heading towards the road, Stiles already formulating his perfectly good excuse why he wasn't in school.

"I've got Melissa McCall calling me in a panic, because _you_ called her in a panic worried about Scott not showing up for school."

"Or answering his phone. Or his texts." Stiles pointed out that other pertinent fact.

"Stiles, from what she says, its been barely been four hours. Don't you think you're jumping the gun a little? Teenagers have been known to skip school on occasion. Case in point - - you two."

"Dad," Stiles threw out his arms in frustration. "He didn't just get a wild hair and decide to cut all his classes and sever communication with the _world_ halfway to school. Something happened!"

"He's right, Sheriff Stilinski," Allison added her voice to Stiles. "After what happened during break, he would have let someone know - - "

"Unless he couldn't." Stiles finished up.

His dad opened his mouth to maybe argue the other side of that point, then stopped, staring past them towards the woods. Stiles spun on his heel. Isaac was trudging out of the trees, pushing a motorbike. Scott's bike.

Stiles had known. He'd damn well known, but this confirmation that something terrible had happened made his stomach plummet.

Allison whispered. "That's Scott's bike."

"Crap," his dad said.

"You think he just left his bike in the woods, too, while he was skipping class?" Stiles wasn't feeling charitable. He was feeling vaguely sick and desperate and those two combined had him way into the red on the testiness scale.

His dad took a breath, turning things over in his head. Knowing things now that he hadn't three months ago. Things that didn't necessarily make his job easier and damn sure made it pricklier. It wasn't like he could go into the station and start explaining the missing seventeen year old in question was a werewolf who'd gotten on the bad side of a hunter who specialized in supernatural game.

"All right. I'm putting out an APB. The three of you - - take his bike back to his house and wait for me there."

# # #

_She lay quiet and still, biding her time. _

_She knew the scents of the Man's soldiers, and she would track them one and all and rip them to pieces. None would escape her rage once she rid herself of the bonds the Man had placed upon her. The Man and the bitch that smelled like him, she would tear open and feed upon their organs. She had spent days, while the awareness of self crept back to her like the whisper of a long dead shade, dwelling on nothing save the vengeance she would reap. _

_But now her attention had shifted and the Man and his minions were only peripheral presences in her awareness, all her senses trained on the Wolf. _

_The thud of his frantic heartbeat. The soft rasp of breath. The occasional sound of pain, the growl of effort as he tested the limits of his restraints and failed. The scent of his blood when he bled afterwards. He reeked of it. Blood and fear and desperation. A young wolf, without the test of time to harden him against the harsh reality of pain and death._

_The Man would take him and he would break him, because that was his way. Because the Man had been bested at the hunt and the man held grudges. _

_But the Man was not the only hunter bested by a fledgling wolf, not the only predator that savored his grudges. _

_The Wolf was hers. _

_She lay down, inhaling the scent of him - - and waited._

# # #

"Tell me why you think its Dupont?"

Had been the first thing Sheriff Stilinski had asked when they gathered in Scott's kitchen. Isaac had ridden the bike home after Allison had hot wired it for him - - a burgeoning habit that she hoped they didn't have to repeat again. There were other things that smacked of deja vu - - chief among them the desperate fear that someone she loved was simply gone and that nothing she could do could save his life.

And she hated that feeling of helplessness. It was the stuff of her nightmares.

"The guy followed us halfway across the state - - he's a psychopath - - he's holding a grudge - - Allison's dad says he never gives up on a hunt - - I've got a _feeling_." Stiles flung out his hands for added emphasis. He was practically vibrating, a virtual melting pot of nerves.

His dad stared at him long and hard, before turning his gaze to Allison. "Do you have a feeling, too?"

"It doesn't matter if I have a feeling." She said quietly, adding another brick to the internal dam blocking the flow of those debilitating emotions that made her want to find a corner and cry. When she'd seen Isaac with that bike and she'd known Stiles was right, it was like the world had stopped, nothing registering inside her head for a few precious seconds but an all-consuming wave of fear. Stiles had ranted half the way to Scott's house, because that's what he did when he was afraid, while she'd sat there, silent in her own terror and started the construction of that wall. "What matters is Scott's gone and somebody dumped his bike in the woods to cover it up. Stiles' is right about Julian Dupont. My father says relentless isn't a word that does him justice and he has more than just a failed hunt to be angry about. You and my father brought the attention of the law down upon him and for a man that operates in the shadows that was inconvenient."

Stiles sniffed at the understatement. Isaac leaned against the refrigerator, brows drawn, this look in his eyes that boded well for no one. It wouldn't take much and he'd explode and she didn't know if she could stop him. Scott could have.

"I've got every deputy in the county on the lookout for Scott. I'll put out a bolo with Dupont's description. Allison, you need to call your father. He has contacts in the world this man operates in that I don't."

She took a breath, nodding. She should have done it already, but she'd been too busy staving off the emotion that wanted to cripple her.

She was digging for her phone when Melissa McCall got home. She should have known someone was on their way in from the way Isaac had canted his head, hearing something the rest of the hadn't. And from the hunched shoulders, and the miserable look on his face before the car had even pulled into the drive, it could have only been Scott's mother.

She burst into the kitchen and stopped, clutching her bag, staring at them all wide eyed and pale, taking in the fact that there were less of them than there should have been and stating the obvious.

"You haven't found him."

Sheriff Stilinski stepped forward when the boys were conspicuously silent. "Not yet. I've got my deputies looking."

"Is it the man that had them before? The Hunter?" she asked softly.

"Yes," Stiles finally found his voice and got a sharp look from his father for the effort.

"We don't know, yet."

"We do know. _I_ know," Stiles said.

"Stiles!" His father pointed a finger this time. "We have a theory. We don't have the facts to back it up."

"His bike's outside," she said.

And for a moment, none of them could think up the words to respond to that, when her face was already crumbling with desperation.

"We found it in the woods," Allison spoke up and filled the silence men and boys weren't willing to. "That's were Isaac lost his scent. I think its Dupont, too. I think we need to find him quickly or we won't find him at all."

Melissa took a deep breath, maybe having her own rituals for forcing calm in desperate situations. She dealt with life and death every day, after all and that was not a calling suited for a woman prone to hysteria.

"Okay," she said, nodding, but her hands were shaking ever so slightly. "Thank you, for that."

"Melissa," Sheriff Stilinski said. "I'm going to take the alert statewide. He's a minor, and they're right, this man Dupont has resources. We'll do everything within our power - -"

"John," she cut him off, and Allison figured first names were the least of the formalities practiced when you'd been tied up together for the better part of two days. "Don't give me the official spiel. I don't want platitudes. I just want my son. Find my son."

# # #

The light coming in through the slats in the barn wall had started to fade when they came for him. A handful of Dupont's men that came and stood outside the cage with faint looks of amusement on their faces, before they triggered the current that ran through the bars and took Scott down. The beast in the neighboring cage snarled, pacing with the click of claws against metal. He could hear it through the thudding of his heart and the ringing in his ears.

They dragged him out, trusting the electricity to have incapacitated him long enough for them to do whatever it was they had in mind. Not counting on the desperate rush of adrenalin that fed strength to quivering muscles.

He threw his weight against one and sent the man tumbling, ripped his arm out of the grip of the other and lunged with a snarl and flash of teeth that sent the man scrambling backwards, fumbling for the stun baton that hung at his belt.

Scott wasn't looking for a fight. He was looking for a way out. He got all of six steps before acid flooded his veins and he went down screaming.

The men came back then, while he was writhing in the dirt and took their petty vengeance, hitting him with the business ends of their stun batons until any semblance of control he had over his muscles evaporated on a red tinged wave of convulsion.

The smell of blood was overpowering, the taste of it was, flooding his mouth where he'd bitten through his tongue. Dupont's scent got past even that. Scent he could count on when even vision failed.

A body crouched down next to him and he knew it was Dupont.

"Do you know I was eight years old when I killed my first wolf? Not your kind of wolf, of course - - that would come later - -but a rangy tundra beast just north of the Ukraine. One of my father's hunting expeditions. I believe there was a Soviet premier in attendance - - my father was popular with the Russians. And Russians do have a taste for killing wolves."

He pushed Scott onto his back and leaned down over him until his vision cleared enough for him to focus. "I know a Soviet secretary General that would kill to get his hands on you. Quite literally. An excellent customer despite certain - - perversions."

Scott drew in a shuddery breath, shivering with the fading vestiges of his body plunging into shock and recovering. He wasn't entirely sure how much more he could take of this before the healing began to falter.

Dupont looked at his wristwatch and smiled. "I imagine my sister has started a hunt of her own now. She's quite the talented marksman."

Scott shut his eyes, curling his fists that had gone half numb behind him. Nails bit into his palms, a stab of honest pain. Pleading for a life - - any life - - with this man was a waste of breath. Better to find his moment and tear out his throat. He didn't know when murder had become such an easy solution to swallow. Maybe around the time the acid burning through his blood stream had started eating away at his sanity a little shred at a time while this man casually talked about killing people he loved.

"I may have to take out Argent as well. He's not a man to take lightly. His girl as well, if she's taken up the family trade. The last thing anyone needs is an Argent with a score to settle."

Scott did lunge then, the pain meaning nothing, full wolf from one second to the next. The only thing that kept him from sinking his teeth into Dupont's flesh were his men, loitering around them, catching hold of his jacket, his hair and hauling him backwards. They shocked him with stun batons before the ones with a grip on him had released their hold and took at least two of them down with him.

"Don't touch her," he gasped, when he could draw in enough air to get the words out.

Dupont pushed himself to his feet, brushing off the straw and the dirt from his clothing. "Ah. She's the reason Chris Argent finds himself allied with a wolf. Have you fucked his little girl? Are generations of Argents turning in their graves at the sheer irony?"

Dupont laughed, seemingly genuinely amused.

"Fuck you - -" Scott ground out, twisting at the manacles.

"Now that's disrespectful and I don't tolerate disrespect from beasts."

He triggered the collar, and Scott stopped trying the metal around his wrists in favor of screaming and curling in a knot on the ground.

There was the clink of chain and when his vision cleared he saw Dupont standing there with a coiled length of it in his hands.

"I think it's about time you and I established a few ground rules about the hierarchy of our relationship in terms a wolf can understand." He jerked his head to his men and casually ordered. "String him up."

# # #

It started raining around five, which made an already miserable grey day even grayer and more miserable. It also meant any trace of a scent a wolf with a keen nose might have picked up was as good as lost.

They kept looking anyway. Trying all those places with meaning, because they had no idea where else to look. Beacon Hills was a sprawling town and the surrounding county was massive, with miles and miles of thickly forested woodland. Even with a thousand people searching, without a starting point, they were shooting in the dark.

The alternative was to sit at home and slowly loose their minds, which was no alternative at all. Stiles' dad had pulled in every off duty deputy on his staff and had them scouring the roads. The twins were out prowling the east side of the county, and both Deacon and Chris Argent were exhausting what resources they had. And so far nothing.

Stiles and Isaac and Allison had been searching on their own, but come nine o'clock when the January day had already faded to dark they met back up on school grounds to compare failures. It was so frustrating Stiles wanted to scream. He did internally, pacing back and forth in front of the empty bleachers where Allison and Isaac sat.

"So what do we do? What the hell do we do now? What if it's too late, already?"

"We don't give up," Allison said adamantly, huddling against the very fine mist in her black pea coat. Her hair was lank with moisture, long strands of it clinging to the pale, pale skin of her face. They were all wet and miserable and tired. "We never give up."

Isaac just stared into the darkness across the field, eyes hidden in shadow, like he was extending all of his senses, even now.

Stiles wished he had her determined hope, or Isaac's sharpened senses, because devoid of both of them, he felt lost. Worst-case scenario was always his go to expectation and he'd had a long time today to imagine terrible things. He needed someone to calmly and patiently talk him down from the ledge of his own making, but Isaac was walking his own thin line and Allison didn't have the patience to focus on anything but the problem at hand. And neither one of them was Scott who would have understood and who would have taken the time to help find the flaws in Stiles' logic.

Allison's phone rang and she dug it out of her coat pocket. Stiles stopped his pacing and stared while she carried out a brief conversation that consisted mostly of 'okay's and all right's'.

"That was my dad," she said when she'd hung up. "He's got feelers out and he's hopeful some of them will get back to him soon. He wants to talk with Gerard and he wants me to be there."

"He thinks Gerard will know something?" Stiles asked, feeling a little stab of hope. A miserable source to place any sort of trust in, but beggars couldn't very well be choosers. And Gerard knew things - - a great many things - - if you could untangle the truths from the lies.

She rose, picking up the small black crossbow that she'd had on the bench between herself and Isaac. "Gerard knows Dupont. So maybe. We'll find out."

"You want us to come?" Isaac asked.

"No. I think it'll be more productive if its just me and dad. I'll call you when I'm done."

They walked her across the field to the parking lot where her car sat next to Stiles' jeep. Stiles paced back towards the field after she'd driven off, not wanting to leave yet - -nowhere to really go but home and once he returned there it would be like giving up.

"I don't know what to do," he said it more to himself than Isaac.

"Like she said. We keep looking."

"Where?"

Isaac shrugged.

There was a little stone culvert than ran behind the field, with a fenced off half round drainage pipe. The concrete was covered in spray painted proclamations, most of them a romantic nature. There weren't a lot of serious taggers in the suburbs of Beacon Hills.

"We missed tryouts today," Stiles kicked a clump of soggy earth into the culvert and watched the steady stream of water running along the bottom carry it towards the drainage pipe.

"Yeah," Isaac stood staring towards the distant line of trees beyond the lacrosse field.

"Coach was pretty adamant about attending tryouts. You think we lost our chance at first line?"

"Not me and Scott. Coach isn't stupid." Isaac said it as if it weren't an insult.

Stiles narrowed his eyes, something snitty on the tip of tongue.

He felt the sting of impact, before he registered the sound of the shot. It spun him to one side, and for a second he thought someone had flung a rock out of the shadows, before Isaac tackled him to the ground. The crack of the second shot, he heard. The grunt of pain as Isaac maybe took a hit, but stayed crouched there over him regardless, fangs out and eyes glowing yellow. Another crack and dirt went up by his shoulder and then something slammed into the both of them, carrying them over the edge and down into the cover of the drainage ditch.

They hit concrete, and predictably Stiles ended up on the bottom of the tangle, half submerged in cold water. Isaac got jerked off of him, and he got yanked up by a fist in his jacket collar.

He blinked up in shock at the grim visage of Derek Hale. Stubbled face, hard eyes, jaw set in a grim line of annoyance. In other words, his usual expression. No one in Beacon Hills had seen hide or hair of him since he'd left close to four months ago with his sister. A dozen questions quivered at the tip of Stiles' tongue and none of them took precedent over cowering when a shot cracked off the lip of the culvert over his head, showering them with bits of concrete.

"You. Stay." Derek stabbed a finger at Stiles. Then one at Isaac. "You. There are maybe two to the west. Three more to the east. You take the west. Go."

Then he was out of the culvert in one bound and Isaac gone in another without a goddamned word of explanation. Stiles sat there, feet in the water, gasping after breath. His shoulder throbbed like maybe a whole colony of wasps had decided to zap him in the same exact spot. Gingerly he lifted a hand and felt under his coat. The shoulder of his shirt was wet. Warm wet. And when he pressed his fingers to his flesh, the throbbing went viral.

He grimaced, leaning over his knees as the ache started radiating outwards.

He'd been shot. He'd actually _been shot_. The notion of it became just a little surreal. His vision spun in a wave of lightheadedness, but that might have been more from sheer panic than the result of the wound. The _bullet_ wound. Then another shot rang out, and another and survival instinct let him shake it off. He scrambled towards the drainage pipe and pressed his back to the chain link, sinking down as low as he could. He clutched the shoulder despite the pain, visions of bleeding out dancing through his head. What if it had bounced off a bone and ricocheted down into his body and he was bleeding internally and didn't even know it. Would you feel something like that or would it be just one big numb? He should know that. Why didn't he know that? Lydia would know. He should call and ask.

He'd been shot. He'd been shot. That bounced around inside his skull like the repetitive chorus of a department store jingle. And why had he been shot? Well the answer to that was painfully clear. Scott hadn't been the only one to escape Dupont's hunt. He'd just been the one Dupont wanted the most.

He didn't even realize the shots had stopped - - that the night had gone silent and had been silent for some time, until a man he'd never seen before staggered to his knees at the top of the culvert with Derek close on his heels. A man in dark, camouflage clothing and an empty holster at his armpit. The guy tried to get to his feet, but a kick to the back of his legs sent him down with a grimace of pain.

Stiles pushed himself up and used the chain link at the mouth of the culvert to pull himself up the curved slope. Isaac was loping back across the field, minus any captured gunmen.

"God, is this the guy who was shooting at me?" Stiles gasped when he'd made it to the top.

"The one capable of still talking." Derek said shortly, before yanking the man up with a clawed hand curled around the back of his neck. Nails bit into flesh, making blood dribble down.

"I know you work for Dupont." Stiles forgot his pain and the stunning development of _being shot_ and lunged down to grab hold of the man's shirt. "Where is he? Where's Scott?"

The guy glared up, a sneer on his face. When he slipped a hand into his boot and pulled out the gun hidden there, Stiles didn't see the move. He barely saw the arm coming up with the muzzle of the weapon aimed at his chest before Isaac cried out and Derek stepped in and with one sharp motion, snapped the man's neck like so much dry kindling.

And that was that. The guy just dropped dead at Stiles' feet and seeing it and hearing the sound of bone snapping, close up made him stand there in shock a beat, bile rising up in his throat.

"Well that's just great," he finally managed to mutter. "Just fantastic. You couldn't wait till he answered my question."

Derek stood there a second, brows faintly drawn as if he weren't quite sure he were hearing the complaint correctly. "Would you rather I had let him shoot you?"

"Again. Shoot me again." Stiles reminded everyone at large, then. "Where the hell did you come from?"

"I called him." Isaac shrugged, staring down at the body. "This morning, when you were in the middle of your second or third freak out."

Stiles opened his mouth. Shut it, too many things whirling around inside his head at the moment to form a single cohesive sentence. He took a breath and addressed the first one to get past the logjam. "I had a pretty good fucking reason to freak out. Scott's missing and I just got fucking shot. Oh my God, I'm shot."

Derek grabbed his arm and with no consideration whatsoever for the state of his wounds, yanked the collar of jacket and shirt away from his shoulder to actually see the damage. All Stiles could see from his angle was the blood stained mess of his jacket.

"Oh my God, is it bad? How bad is it?"

"It grazed you," Derek announced shortly, letting him go. "It's nothing."

Stiles gaped in indignation. "Oh, right and your medical degree came from where. Werewolf MU?"

Derek ignored his frenzy, gaze going to the body on the ground, then flicking up to shift between Isaac and Stiles.

"Shut up, and tell me what happened?"


	6. Chapter 6

6

There wasn't a whole lot to tell Derek that Stiles couldn't sum up in a few concise words that ran along the lines of: Crazy ass hunter with a score to settle over the fact that he and Scott had had the audacity not to roll over and die for him.

It was maybe the shortest explanation of a miserable situation that Stiles had ever given in his life. But then he was distracted and he hurt. And though he was relieved that Derek was here, because they could use every set of claws they could get, he wasn't sure how much help he was going to be unless they actually found something to rip into.

"Have you tried calling to him?" Derek asked, while all three of them were standing out in the mist, wet and cold with a dead body at their feet. And yes, he'd seen dead bodies before - - too many dead bodies - - and they still never failed to make him want to crawl out his skin. It was worse when you actually saw the death in progress. Alive one minute, dead the next. And how many teenagers could claim they'd experienced that more than once? It must have been a damned exclusive club and he wished he could revoke his membership.

"Do you think we're idiots?" Stiles scoffed, brandishing his phone. "I've called. I've texted. He's not answering. I can try again if you like listening to voice mail."

"I mean, _calling_ to him?" Derek fixed Isaac with his stare, ignoring Stiles.

Isaac opened his mouth. Shut it with a snap and shook his head, looking abashed. "I didn't think - - no."

Stiles stared between the two and then he got it. "Wolf calls. You mean wolf calls?"

"Yes," Derek confirmed.

"You've got a pretty good range with that, right? That might work, if he can answer. If he can't answer - - it's a waste of time. What sort of range?"

Derek drew his brows, at that breathless collection of words.

"Miles," he answered.

"Okay, then lets do that,"

"Us," Derek corrected. "Not you. You'll just slow us down."

"The hell. You're not ditching me."

"You're bleeding." Derek jerked his chin towards the broadening stain of red under Stiles' jacket. "Go home. Take care of it."

Derek started walking towards the parking lot, Isaac on his heels. Stiles stood there a moment stewing in indignant offense before following. Arguing with Derek was like arguing with a block of stone. Worse, because the stone blocks didn't have the tendency to get violent when you pushed them to the limits of their patience.

"So where's Cora?"

Derek cast him a glower over his shoulder.

"Reno."

"Nevada? Wasn't that where the pack was that she was hanging out with before she came back here?"

Derek didn't feel the need to confirm or deny that information.

"Why didn't she come with you? Did you two piss each other off, already? I can see that, since you both have such effervescent personalities."

He got another, darker look for that perfectly accurate observation. Derek's car was in the parking lot not far from Stiles' Jeep. It looked about as dirty and mud spattered as the Jeep. Derek would have had to have started back pretty soon after Isaac called him to have gotten here when he did, driving all the way from Nevada.

"What happened?" Stiles followed them to the car and pressed the issue.

"I didn't like her pack. They didn't like me. She had issues. She'll get over them. Go home. Stay there." That was almost a growl. And Stiles had to figure there was more to that half assed explanation than Derek was spilling. That and he was worried. He wasn't an alpha anymore, but the young wolves he'd left in Beacon Hills were still pack and Derek might be all about the tough love, but he went to the mat for pack.

"Call me if you hear anything," he directed that at Isaac, since he didn't trust Derek to do it. "I mean _anything_."

Isaac nodded before he slid into the passenger seat of the car.

Which left Stiles standing alone in a darkened parking lot with a throbbing bullet wound in his shoulder and a dead body across the field. He ought to call his dad. But then, if his dad knew he'd had somebody shooting at him - - and _hitting_ him - - he'd have him locked in a cell somewhere until the danger was over. Which might be never if his luck ran the way it usually did. Someone would eventually discover the body and report it. Whether there were more in the woods, he hadn't thought to inquire of Derek or Isaac.

Derek and Isaac who had left him here, alone in a dark, deserted parking lot, after just getting shot. He cast a nervous look at the line of black trees surrounding the field and imagined creeping snipers coming back for a second try. He fumbled for his keys and got into the Jeep.

Home was out of the question for multiple reasons. If his dad _was_ there, he'd freak out - -if he wasn't - - well, Stiles wasn't eager to be sitting alone at home with a bunch of psychotic hunters out to kill him.

His first choice of safe haven was currently unavailable - - having God knew what being done to him - - so he started the Jeep and headed towards the next best thing.

Lydia answered the door after the fourth or fifth time he rang the bell. He stood there, wet and muddy on her stoop, trying to think up something to say when there were so many things crowding his mind. 'Hey. I got shot,' seemed to be a poor opening gambit. Or maybe it was a really good one and he was just too tired to take advantage of a sure thing when it shot him in the shoulder.

"Did you find him?" she asked with the tone of someone who was expecting the worse and he supposed that maybe he had on the sort of expression that hinted at grief and despair.

"Not yet. Umm - - Can I come in?"

She blinked, then stepped back, clear invitation. "You've been looking all day?"

"Pretty much. My dad's got everybody out. Allison's dad is looking. The wolves are looking - -Derek's back by the way. Still nothing. I just needed someplace - - " his voice gave out on him and for a moment he had to shut his eyes, things welling up that adrenalin and purpose had held at bay most of the day.

"Is that blood?" She broke him out of it and he blinked, lifting a hand reflexively to his shoulder.

"I got shot." He laughed a little hysterically and had to shut his eyes again to nip it in the bud.

"Really? And you mention this as an afterthought?"

"No. Its right up in the forethought category - -"

She caught his hand and pulled him towards the kitchen. He let her push him towards a kitchen stool and slouched there, while she pulled out a first aid box from under the counter.

"They dumped his bike in the woods," he said numbly.

"I know. Allison told me." She helped him shrug out of his jacket. Moving the left arm hurt like a bitch.

"Shirt," she said, and he hesitated, feeling this weird little catch of breathless modesty. As many fantasies as he'd had about getting naked with Lydia - - this scenario, with him bloody and dirty and exhausted, hadn't figured in.

"Stiles," she dipped her head to give him a wry look. "You don't have anything I haven't seen before and I'm not asking you to strip down."

"Right. Thanks for that," he muttered, and let her help him with the shirt. He sat there sucking on inside of his cheek while she wet a rag and started messing with his shoulder.

"Derek said it just grazed me. Did it? How bad is it?" He twisted his head trying to see, not trusting Derek not to have underestimated the severity of the wound.

"Would you stop moving around? Let me clean the blood away so I can see. You probably should have gone to the emergency room and had an actual medical professional look at this."

"Yeah, well, they report gunshot wounds and I'm not ready for my dad to go ballistic and lock me down until they catch this guy."

"You don't have supernatural healing abilities, so maybe staying out of the line of fire is a good thing. He was right. It's not that deep. It just scored you. The blood makes it look worse than it is."

She held up fingers that were red with it - - and stopped, frozen, eyes glued to the stain on her hands. There were droplets of it, crimson against the pristine white marble of the island countertop.

"I know," he mumbled. "I got blood all over - -" he started to apologize and hesitated, something about the detached look in her eyes setting off warning signs. "Lydia?

He might not have spoken at all for all the attention she paid him. All her focus was on the red coating her fingers.

She canted her head, then without a word moved past him, idly sweeping up a set of keys on the far counter as she walked towards the door that presumably lead to the garage.

He sat there for a split second in shock; realization starting to set in that what he was seeing was her in the midst of a death trance. Or whatever the hell it was that sent her into the fugue like states she experienced when she inevitably ended up sniffing out something horrible.

"Oh - - God - -" He snatched up his shirt and his jacket and went after her.

She was already in her car, and he only managed to get the passenger door open and slip in next to her by the skin of his teeth. The car was moving before his foot left the ground.

He sat there, afraid to say anything in fear of snapping her out of it. Ever since break, he'd been pestering her about the slightest hint of some sort of death related premonition. Now he was scared to death dwelling on the grim possibilities of whatever it was that was drawing out her inner wailing woman. Without fail, when she when she went on once of these little jaunts, there was usually a body waiting for her.

He prayed that body wasn't Scott's.

# # #

There was a certain point, Scott had thought, where individual pains would stop having meaning. That when the agony kept coming, wave after wave with no room for recovery between the bouts, that it would all blend into one big, overwhelming miasma of hurt.

He found that wasn't quite the case. Individual pain mattered. The slice of a knife through the skin was no less distinguishable than the burn of acid bleeding into his bloodstream, or the jolt of electricity to the balls. The only thing that started to melt into insignificance was time. The only thing that kept him from folding in upon himself, shattering into a thousand screaming pieces - - was the rage that kept boiling up, indignant and miserable and grief stricken, every time Dupont would lean in and whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

They'd shocked him into oblivion and stripped him of his jacket and his shirt, refastened his hands in front of him and hauled him up like a side of beef ready for the carving. The ground under him was soaked with blood from where Dupont had already started the process.

For a while they had an audience; the skulking figures of Dupont's men waiting in the shadows of the barn, casually observing their employer at work. The girl who had lured him into ambush appeared once, as seemingly unconcerned with the atrocities Dupont was carrying out as the rest of them. She stayed for a while, carrying on a hushed conversation with one of the men, before she wondered out. Soon after, Dupont ordered the rest of them from the barn, as if the things he were doing had become too personal a matter for the eye of the casual observer.

And if he'd wanted anything - - asked anything that Scott could have answered - - could have given him - - he would have. Only Dupont wanted nothing from him save his pain - - and that he took without any cooperation from Scott at all. And he couldn't understand the look in Dupont's eyes, the palpable sense of _lust_ that seeped from the man's very pores at the slow destruction of another living thing. Oh, he understood the fact that the bastard was getting off on it - - he just couldn't wrap his mind around how a psyche could become so utterly warped.

The edge of the knife sliced low across his stomach. The same spot it had already scored. Just deep enough to cut through skin and muscle, but not so deep that his guts might spill out. Dupont had pointed out this kindness. He was considerate in explaining the anatomy of his methods.

It hurt no less this time, than it had the last, and Scott shuddered convulsively, choking back a cry of pain. His skin twitched as much from Dupont's fingers tracing the edges of the already closing wound as from the wound itself. The hand slid up his stomach to rest on the center of his chest, palm cool and repulsive against his overheated skin. The other hand brought the tip of the knife to the hollow at the base of his neck, just below the collar. It pierced skin and he shut his eyes, grinding his teeth in his efforts to fight back the wail that wanted to burst free. He couldn't stop the tremors, though. The debilitating quaking of muscles that came with prolonged trauma.

"Do you know," Dupont said casually, as he drew the blade down, splitting skin in its wake. "That since I took over my father's trade - - I've never failed in a hunt? Oh, it may have taken years to find the trail of some prey - - the female vanago, for instance - - but once the hunt began, I'd never had prey elude me."

The knife stopped just above Scott's navel and Dupont stood there, watching the blood trickle down to join the migration southward from the first wound. He circled behind, while the flesh was still knitting.

Breath came hard, lodging in his throat. He went alternately cold and hot, light headed and faint to painfully clear awareness of what was being perpetrated upon him. The wounds healed, but the body still reacted violently to the infliction.

"Th-that's why you're doing th-this?" He found his voice, between labored breaths. It came out hoarse and weak, his throat raw from either prolonged screaming or the last shot of acid from the collar. It hardly mattered which. "Because we wounded your pride?"

Dupont's laugh had nothing of humor in it. He stepped in close to Scott's back, hand moving down the line of his spine, as if he were tracing out the next line of attack. His breath was warm against his ear when he whispered.

"You're an Alpha, boy and you don't understand the value of pride?"

Dupont slid his hand across his hip, fingers slipping inside the blood soaked waistband of his jeans. If he could have flinched away, he would have, but there was nowhere to go.

"You embarrassed me in front of men to whom reputation is everything. I lost face and I promise you, before I sell you to the highest bidder and help him hunt you down and kill you, I will take what you cost me out of your flesh."

"Oh for God's sake, Julian get your hands out of his pants and your mind back on business. If you've got a hard on for this wolf, take care of it somewhere where his pack isn't likely to track us down and cost us more than we've already lost because of two boys."

Jan Dupont stalked out of the shadows and her brother hissed, withdrawing his hand, then driving the knife into Scott's side in a pique of annoyance. Scott choked on a scream, twisting where he hung with the knife still lodged above his hip while Dupont stepped towards his sister.

Through the red clouding his vision, Scott saw blood on her jaw. A set of shallow slices from the corner of her jaw to her shoulder. Claw marks. Isaac, he thought. If she'd gone after Stiles, Isaac might have been with him. And if he'd gotten close enough to get in a strike - -

But then, if he'd gotten that close and she was here, able to walk away, maybe he hadn't been able to. And if he had been with Stiles - - maybe Stiles hadn't been able to walk away either. Flashes of terrible imagery bombarded him in time with the throb of a heart that was valiantly trying to pump blood through his veins. A lot less blood than what he'd had. And flesh knitted, but he wasn't so sure that his body could create blood out of thin air. The knife in his side wasn't helping, blood seeping out, thick and warm, down his side, soaking his jeans, the wound unable to heal because of the blade. The pain was this screeching hornets nest that radiated out from the point of entry.

Grey crowded in amongst the red of his vision, the world tipping out from under him, sickening blood flavored bile rising in his throat, dribbling out his mouth as internal bleeding as well as external, began to take its toll.

"We've got a problem," Jan said. "Least of all your toy bleeding out."

Dupont glanced back, lifted a brow, and casually yanked the blade out. He wiped the dark blood off on the thigh of Scott's jeans before sliding it into the sheath at his belt.

"I take it from the bloody memento on your face that your hunting expedition ran into a snag?"

"You might say that." Her eyes were glacial. "I lost two men. And this little hick town's crawling with more law than I would have given it credit for. There's an all points bulletin out with your description attached, by the way. And wolves. His pack, I would assume. We need to leave here while we _can_ leave. You've had enough time to play, Julian. Once we're across the border with a destination in mind, you can devote all the time you want to your little games."

"You have no sense of adventure, my dear," Dupont waved a negligent hand. "But I concede to your good sense."

"I've arranged for plane - -" she said and her voice was fading in and out of Scott's hearing, eaten up by the rush of the blood in his ears.

"What's got her so upset?" Dupont's curious voice, and after a moment, Scott realized he was speaking about the beast in the cage. The vanago was growling, its claws clacking on the metal of its cage as it paced.

Then he heard the sound that had likely set it off. The distant howl of a wolf. He squeezed his eyes shut at the overwhelming sense of hope that rushed in at the sound. The sound of succor. The sound that meant he wasn't alone.

He threw back his head and answered it, the vanago in its cage roaring a challenge to his call. Then Dupont triggered the collar and the agony of fire burning through his veins turned the howl into a scream.

# # #

Allison was on her way home from seeing her grandfather, when she got the call from Stiles.

Gerard had been next to useless. Oh, he knew the Dupont family well enough, had even taught a few things about hunting beasts of a supernatural flavor to the current Dupont's father, but the only thing they'd accomplished by going to visit the old man, had been to shake Allison's control to the core. He had stories to tell and none of them were anything but horrific.

"Which one does he have?" the old man had asked, a glint of amusement in his eyes, as if they'd brought him a story to brighten the dull, painful hours of his day. Then, he'd answered his own question. "It's Scott, isn't it? Any other wolf he'd kill out of hand - - but a _true_ Alpha - - now _that_ would catch his attention." And how Gerard had known about Scott's change in werewolf status she didn't know. It wasn't like she or her father were giving him regular updates. If they could avoid it, they didn't see him at all.

"If you know something that will help us, tell us," her father had said. "Otherwise, we've got better things to do."

"If Dupont has him for long - - he'll wish he were dead. That I can tell you. The man's an artist when it comes to breaking beasts." Gerard had laughed, little droplets of black spittle dotting his lips.

"He's _not_ a beast," Allison had growled, her calm slipping in the face of Gerard's casual disparagement. "You're the monster. A man who hunts innocent people is the monster."

"There are no innocent people. No innocent wolves for damn sure."

And that was how it had gone, until his rancor had driven her away with goose bumps on her arms and a chill in her heart. Stiles telling her that Lydia was in the midst of a death trance was simply icing on the cake. He'd stayed on the phone with her, giving whispered directions, taking her along a route that she knew and knew well. A road into the wooded backcountry of the county. She saw the lights of Lydia's car off the side of the road, parked haphazardly, not that far from the spot Allison usually parked when she wanted that private run, or that time alone to hone her skills.

She grabbed a quiver and a black compound crossbow from the trunk, then headed down the trail where she knew in her gut she'd find them. And she did, maybe a quarter of a mile down the trail, Stiles quietly talking to Lydia, who stood there, with her hands over her mouth, breathing hard and fast.

"Guys?" she called softly, and Stiles started, looking over Lydia's shoulder towards her.

Lydia turned and even in the faint glow of the flashlight that Stiles had pointed at the ground, her face was pale, her eyes wide and distraught.

"What happened?" Allison asked, striding up to them. "What did you see?"

"I don't know," Lydia whispered, looking between Allison and Stiles desperately. "I didn't have a '_vision'_. It doesn't work that way. I don't even remember driving here. It's just - - " She shuddered suddenly, as if she'd been hit with a arctic blast. "Blood. There's blood everywhere. And death."

"Scott?" Stiles' voice was a choked whisper.

Lydia shook her head, lifting one trembling hand to her mouth, eyes wide in dawning horror. "I don't know. I just feel - - so much death."

She lifted a trembling hand, pointed, down the trail and whispered. "Blood soaked into rotting wood and dirt and straw."

"Wood and straw?" Something hovered on the tip of Allison's memory.

A snowy day. Herself with a bow in hand, walking a trail she usually ran. She saw the girl in the snow in her mind's eye. Saw the shape of a huge, old barn behind her, weathered and grey, the farmhouse across from it in not much better shape. A project. Strangers in an old place that didn't welcome guests.

"I know where that is," she whispered and she was sure of it. As sure as she was that if Scott were dead, she'd aim for the hearts of the people responsible and she wouldn't hesitate pulling the trigger.

Stiles jerked his attention from Lydia to her. "Where? What the hell?"

"Go back to the car, Lydia," Allison said, calmly checking the bolts already loaded into the crossbow. "Call my dad. Tell him where we are.

"I don't know where we are," Lydia said, miserably.

"Tell him the place where I run. Tell him the old farmhouse, before you get to the quarry."

Lydia nodded. "Be careful. I don't know what it is, but the death I sense - - it's hungry."

"Well, that's just fantastic," Stiles muttered.

"You should go with her," Allison said. "You're not trained to deal with this."

He gave her a look full of incredulous offense. "This is the second time tonight I've been told how useless I am. And you know what, fuck you all. You think you know where Scott is, you lead the way."

She swallowed, staring back at him. At the stubborn determination in his eyes. And that counted. Unshakable resolve was a weapon in its own right.

She started through the woods with him in her wake, following a trail she'd run dozens of times in the light of day. And it was quiet. Weirdly, ominously quiet. None of the night sounds she might have expected, not even the chirping of crickets.

"How far?" he asked.

"Not far - - there." She veered off the trail, cutting towards the clearing with its broad field of untended grass. She crouched in the shelter of the thin, young trees at the edge of the wood and Stiles skidded to his knees in wet mulch beside her.

That's it?"

She didn't answer, staring towards the silhouette of the old house and the barn. A light burned in a window of the house, and there was a faint glow coming from the man-sized portal in the big barn door. There were more cars there than there had been the last time. A pair of SUV's, a big flat bed truck with a canvas cover, a dark sedan and a grey sports car. The girl had said her uncle was an artist who liked his privacy. This was a lot of company for a solitary man.

A lot of potential threats for one girl with a crossbow and an unarmed boy to deal with. She should wait for her father, who would come with weapons more capable of dealing with the sort of artillery Julian Dupont was likely to possess. She had to be smart and she had to be stealthy, because the two of them getting themselves killed wouldn't help Scott at all.

The howl of a wolf pierced the unnatural silence of the wood. No natural four legged wolf, because there were none here, but a layman couldn't have distinguished between the calls.

Then there was another, closer, but that one was an aborted cry, cut short. And then the bass roar of something else entirely, that echoed across the field from the dilapidated barn.

She exchanged a look with Stiles, who was wide-eyed and pale. His hand reached out and gripped her arm, fingers biting into her flesh.

"Holy fucking shit," he hissed, sounding about as shaken as she'd ever heard him.

"What?" She whispered back.

"That second one was not a wolf,"

"It didn't sound like one," she agreed.

"I've heard it before," he said, voice going low and urgent. "When it was fucking hunting me."

She opened her mouth to question him further, and that's when the screams started. And the sound of gunfire. When the first tiny, dark figure of a man slammed out of the barn door, only to get halfway across the threshold and be yanked backwards like a puppet on the string of a particularly malicious puppeteer.

That's when Lydia's prediction of blood and the hungry death that sought it, started to come true.


	7. Chapter 7

7

_She listened to the Man at work. Listened to the screams of the wolf. Smelled the scent of his blood, the scent of his pain. But it was the scent of the Man's zeal for his work that sent her over the edge into a fervor of her own making. That triggered memories of her own dim past - - before this shape she wore had consumed everything. There had been a man - - a lover - - a predator in human form - - who had shared her predilections. Who she had followed through lands ravaged by war and rebellion. Finding like souls in desperate, displaced men. Men who took out their anger and desolation on any hapless enough to cross their paths. And her hands - - her human hands - - had been drenched in blood and she had reveled in it. Just like the Man._

_She paced the length of the cage the Man contained her in and stared with animal eyes at the red coating his hands. A man very much like the one she had attached herself to in another life. If she had not been his victim, she might have attached herself to him in the same manner. But she had never appreciated the bite of pain as much as she enjoyed the giving of it and she had always been a creature with a taste for vengeance. And the need for it was building, a raging beat of need inside her that grew as the awareness of that other self did. _

_She heard the howl before the wolf did, consumed by his pain as he was. The distant call of predators searching for their own. Her blood surged, and she raised her own voice. The wolf joined in, answering in response before the Man could silence him. They would have heard and wolves always came to the aid of their own. _

_The Man knew, as well. He cursed, grabbing from his sibling bitch the black stick that drove bright sparks of electricity into the body and striking the wolf that was already convulsing from the collar's poison. Again and again until the wolf hung limp in his bonds and the man's wrath was sated. The sibling bitch was already calling for their men and the scent of tension in the air made her vibrate with coiled excitement/rage/hunger. She was done waiting._

_The collar had bled itself dry. The cage door stood between her and the carnage she craved and the poison had always been more of a deterrent to her than the sizzling sting of voltage. She wasn't a thin skinned wolf, after all. _

_With a roar that shook the rotting boards of the rafters, she surged against the bars. The current that laced through her only fed the building glee as they gave under her strength._

_The Man and his sibling bitch stared at her in shock, before they both fumbled for holstered guns. _

_She growled, low in her throat, welcoming their attempts - - and then she went on the hunt._

# # #

The screams and the deafening boom of gunfire roused Scott from the stupor that multiple electric shocks had plunged him into. His muscles still seized from it, new blood running down his arms from where the full weight of his body had dug the metal edges of the cuffs into his wrists. He got his feet under him with an effort, flinching at the explosive burst of gunfire that came from just behind him. It took a moment before his vision cleared enough to see the slope shouldered bulk of the vanago raise blood drenched jaws, fresh from ripping the face off the twitching body beneath it. For a split second, its small amber eyes locked on his, its gums drawing back to reveal red stained fangs in a feral grin, then it turned its attention to the next closest man with a gun.

Bullets hit it; he heard the muffled thud of impact of bullet to flesh. A great number of bullets. There were men in the barn that hadn't been there before he'd been shocked into oblivion. Dupont's minions who scrambled for cover, leveling weapons at the vanago, spraying the old barn with bullets that ripped into ancient wood and moldy hay as much as they did the beast they were aimed at. Dupont himself was close behind him, firing rounds himself between screaming orders at his men.

The Vanago launched itself at a man, the leap taking it halfway across the barn. Claws longer by far than his, slashed into the body, diagonally from shoulder to hip, opening up a torso like a butcher splitting a newly killed hog. The body hadn't hit the floor before the thing was bounding towards the next. And that man got out a burst of gunfire and a scream, before his throat and half his lower jaw were ripped away. Blood spattered the weathered gray of the plank wall behind him.

Blood everywhere. A chaos of screaming men, and discharging weapons, the smell of gunfire as acrid as the smell of blood. One of the lanterns went out in the spree, plunging half the barn into a morass of shadow in which the sound of claws ripping flesh, and the screams of a man came like echoes from a nightmare.

He stood on his toes, trying to get a grip on the chain that was clipped to a ring on the bar that linked the cuffs. He wasn't sure the rigid manacles would allow him the dexterity to unclip it, even if he gave himself a little slack.

The he froze, fingers of one hand hooked in the links of the chain, picking up a scent through the myriad array of other unsavory scents, that was as familiar as his own.

# # #

Every instinct Stiles had said run. Run like hell. As far and as fast as he could if the vanago was alive and kicking. Only problem was, if Scott was in that barn too, he couldn't desert him. And Allison wasn't hesitating. Allison was scurrying through the knee-high grass, low to the ground, towards the back of the huge barn. She stopped once, grabbing his arm and yanking him down as the gunfire started in earnest and men ran from the house towards the source of it.

And God, there were screams coming from inside the barn. And the snarling roars of a beast on the rampage. Allison rose and started moving again, while Stiles stomach was trying to wedge itself up into his throat. He pushed himself up and followed, a dozen terrible scenarios, all of them ending up with him dead in some horrible, gruesome way running the gambit of his imagination.

There was a small door at the rear of the barn, but it was latched from the inside. Allison went old school badass and kicked it open, wooden latch that was probably dry rotted anyway giving way under her boot. He could have done it, he was sure, if he hadn't been so distracted by all the noise of violence that they were diving right into like a pair of idiots with death wishes.

There was the huge bulk of a rusted out tractor just inside the door. A lot of accumulated junk as well, that sheltered them from the chaos just beyond.

He heard a bloodcurdling scream - - the sort of scream that hinted that somebody was maybe having their eyeballs pulled out or a hundred nails driven into their skull sort of scream - - and he poked his head above the shoulder high back tire to get a look.

Allison pulled him down by the sleeve, as a spray of gunfire ricocheted off the tractor. Not aiming for them - - just random, desperate fire at the thing he'd caught a glimpse of mauling what looked, at quick glance like a bloody sack of meat in human clothing, but he was pretty sure had been a man.

"Say down," she hissed at him.

That wasn't all he'd seen.

"Scott," he whispered. "Scott's out there."

Her mouth tightened, and she ventured a quick look herself. She dropped back down, back to the tractor wheel, clutching the crossbow to her chest.

"We have to get him," she said, then grabbed his collar and drew him in, staring at him with eyes that held as much desperation as intent. "If I cover you, can you get to him?"

He drew in a gulp of air to fight off the panic that wanted to steal it. "I can if nobody shoots me or rips my face off."

"Okay. Do it," she said as if that supposition on his part hadn't been chock full of gallows sarcasm. "Now," she scrambled up the side of the tractor, for vantage, crossbow at ready.

Fuck. Just fuck. If he thought about it, he'd falter. So he didn't think about it and just darted out from behind the tractor and ran, low to the ground, skirting one terrible, mutilated body leaking blood onto the ground, towards Scott.

Scott who was shirtless and bloody, arms drawn up and attached to a chain hooked to a crossbeam over his head. And he swung around before Stiles got to him, wide-eyed with surprise.

"Hey," Stiles skidded to a stop against him, rocking him half off his balance. "So, how's _your_ day been going?"

"How - -?" Scott obviously wasn't feeling the desperately nervous need to babble. Scott just looked distressed and shell-shocked.

Stiles couldn't help it. "Mine's been stellar so far. Best ever - -" he saw the clip that attached the chain to the cuffs and reached up to unfasten it.

"Watch out - -" Scott cried, and Stiles whirled, staring down the muzzle of the gun Jan Dupont aimed at him. How close she was to pulling the trigger he didn't know, because the crossbow bolt that took her straight in the shoulder made it a moot point. She screamed in outrage, staggering backwards, but she still had the gun and brought it up, firing towards the tractor where Allison perched.

He saw the tail end of Allison's coat as she dove for cover. Scott made a miserable sound, half growl, half moan and yanked at the chain hard enough to make the beam groan and dust sift down from above.

More movement behind Scott, a man, bloody and torn, tossing down a spent gun and running for his life towards the door. And from the shadows at the far side of the barn, the monster lifted its head, shaking blood from its maw and bounded after him. And that thing loping outside after some sorry son of a bitch that maybe deserved what he got, and maybe didn't, was nothing but good luck for them.

Jan Dupont fired into the shadow drenched junk Allison had disappeared into, and again before a bolt appeared in her hip and she went down, loosing her grip on the gun and curling blood stained hands around the black shaft. Where Allison had fired from he didn't know and didn't have the time to suss out. He spared Jan a half second look to make sure she wasn't going for the gun, before reaching back up and desperately working at the chain. Scott was shaking. He could feel it when he leaned against him. Not the nervous trembling that had Stiles' fingers fumbling for purchase, but these uncontrollable spasms that kept wracking his body. Shock maybe. Or the residue of something worse.

The clip came loose and with it Scott's unexpected weight. Stiles almost buckled under him, hands scrabbling for purchase to keep Scott on his feet. Scott's skin was damp with blood and sweat, but Stiles hadn't the time to see if there were any unhealed wounds. He just got an arm around him while Scott was still adjusting to being down, and tried to get them both moving towards the cover of the old tractor and the back way out.

"Allison - -?" Scott gasped, staring into the shadows.

Allison, Stiles figured, could damn well take care of herself. He wasn't particularly worried about her at the moment. He was worried about getting out the middle of this damned blood drenched barn.

Then Scott screamed. This garbled, choked shriek of agony, manacled hands clutching at the dull grey band at this throat, and went down so hard that Stiles couldn't keep him up. He went down with him, one knee hitting the dirt.

"What? What the fuck?" he cried as Scott writhed.

The he caught movement from behind him and spun. Julian Dupont staggered towards them, blood dribbling down the side of his head, a ragged flap of flesh dangling loose from his temple, straw clinging to blood soaked clothing, as if he'd been rolling in it.

"Do you think you little bastards will get the best of me? Again?" he hissed. He had a small remote in hand, that he was stabbing with his thumb. Scott's screams had turned into a choking, blood filled gurgle, he was arching off the ground, tearing gouges down his own neck in this blind desperation to get at the collar around his neck. The collar. The little remote. Stiles made the connection.

"I'll finish this hunt if it's the last - -" was about as far as Dupont got before Stiles lunged at him, hitting him shoulder to gut, bowling him backwards. Dupont was bigger than him, probably knew a lot more about dirty fighting, but he was injured and Stiles was experiencing a singular bout of rage that made him see red. The fist Dupont drove into his side seemed almost inconsequential. He'd feel it later, he was sure. But right now, the adrenalin was rushing and the only thing he could focus on was getting that remote out of the bastard's bloody hand. He got both hands around the wrist with the remote and slammed it against the floor and it tumbled from Dupont's fingers. His single-minded focus on relieving him of the remote did not a good defense make.

This time Stiles felt the fist that drove up and impacted around the area of his sternum. Really felt it. It drove the air right out of him and he tumbled backwards, gasping. Dupont came after him, drawing a knife from a sheath at his belt, death in his eyes.

He scrambled, backwards, feet sliding in old straw on the dirt, so focused on Dupont and the knife that the massive black shape of the Vanago escaped his attention entirely. Granted, it came in fast and Dupont was lunging towards him with the business end of a knife, so distraction was understandable. Between one second and the next the beast pounced, latching hold of Dupont's shoulder in its jaws and flinging him like a terrier flinging a rat. Then it was on him, pinning him under its weight roaring loud enough to shake the rafters.

There was the front end of an enraged, indignant answering cry from Dupont, before it turned into a bloody gurgle and the sickening rip of flesh. Stiles sat there, staring in horror as the thing ripped apart a human body, claws and jaws mangling the soft flesh of the torso with rabid ferocity.

Gore flew, spattering the surrounding ground, and maybe he made a sound of horror/fear/repulsion because it stopped, lifting its bloody maw and turned its gaze towards him.

# # #

_She took the Man. And his blood in her mouth was bitter ecstasy. The hot stench of his guts as she ripped out his belly drove her wild with the want of more. And there was more. The prey that had put a bullet in her eye, staring with wide, terror filled eyes at her as she lifted her maw, a string of dripping intestines drooping from her jaws. She might have enjoyed hunting him down, but now was as good a time as any to take another chunk of bloody vengeance. She shook the gore free of her teeth and lunged towards him._

_He made a frantic sound, scrambling to his feet, trying to dart away like a rabbit trying to evade a clever fox. A bolt lodged in her shoulder. Another in her chest. Another razing her jaw to the bone, all of them fired from one last soft skinned female human prey who perched atop a stack of molding bales of hay. Insignificant in the face of her bloodlust and she would take that last one when she tasted the life's blood of the one in her sights. He had scored a telling blow against her and she had spent time contemplating the rending of his flesh. _

_She hit him. Not a killing blow, but a bit of malicious play before she split him neck to groin and ripped out his organs. The impact flung him against the rusting bulk of a tractor and he crumpled like puppet with its strings cut. She stalked towards him, the fresh scent of his blood making her growl, low in her throat. _

_An impact hit her from the side, and the wolf was on her, tearing at her throat, raking her flesh through her fur even hobbled as he was. He drove one of the bolts deeper into her chest and it hurt, the tip of it hitting something vital inside her. _

_With a roar she shook him off. He rolled with it, coming up in a crouch, eyes full of red fire, roaring a challenge that made her blood rush. She met it with a roar of her own, then feinted in the other direction heading towards the prey she knew he would put himself at risk for. He had done it before. Young, male and wolf all made him easy to predict when it came down to protecting pack._

_He came at her again, putting himself in the path of her charge, which was where she wanted him. His strength against hers was a loosing battle. He went down under her weight, weakened enough from the Man's work and the copious amounts of his blood staining the floor that he was half the predator he had been when she had chased him and his prey down in the woods. He snarled at her, though, baring teeth, raking at her as best he could with still bound hands. She could have eviscerated him. Torn out his throat and severed his spine with one wrenching tear of her own teeth, twice as long and twice as many as his. _

_She plowed through his defenses and lunged down, teeth to his throat. But when she clamped her jaw to his vulnerable neck above the hateful collar, she didn't exert the pressure she might have. She simply crouched there, the heat of his skin under her jaws, the thrumming beat of his frantic pulse against her tongue as he froze, realizing he was one wrench away from her ending him. Not whimpering submission, but the wary acceptance that it was death pressing him into the earth. _

_A bolt hit her in the side of the neck, another bounced off the thick bone above her eye, the female with the bow, off her perch and on the ground moving toward her as she fired. _

_She snarled in pain, considered driving her claws through the wolf's chest, putting him down long enough for her to finish off the rest of the irksome human prey before he had the chance to heal. _

_The pain and the bloodlust clouded her senses enough that she didn't smell the other wolves until they were upon her. One bowled into her, fast and strong, larger and older than her wolf. Claws dug into her face, as he tore at her throat with his teeth. The hateful collar served to benefit her for once, protecting her from the brunt of his ferocious attack. The other new one, darted in, snarling and swiping at her legs like his four-legged progenitor, darting back when she whirled, dislodging the older wolf. Then she had a pack of them facing her, her own wolf included, and the female prey aiming at her with her wretched bow. _

_The beast would have faced them down, driven by rage and pain, regardless that she was injured now and two of the wolves facing her were fresh. The old/new part of her that was wily and clever, knew disadvantage when she saw it. Knew very well from that cloudy past experience that refusal to run for pride's sake was a man's prerogative. _

_So she ran - - because retreat was the only option if she wished to lick her wounds and come back to strike another day. _


	8. Chapter 8

8

Scott's world narrowed to this focused band of red-rimmed vision, all his peripheral awareness eaten up by pain and shock and animal instinct. He crouched there, breath coming too fast, too hard. Claws digging gouges in the hard dirt of the floor, the scent of the beast filling his nostrils, the ghost images of it still flickering in his mind's eye. He wasn't sure it was gone. He wasn't sure the pain wouldn't rush back upon him, unexpected and shred him from the inside out.

Something came at him from behind and he snarled, launching into attack, tearing flesh and cloth with his claws before an arm wrapped around his neck, hauling him backwards. He clawed at that in a frenzy of animal panic, until it tightened, cutting into his air, and words were barked into his ear.

Then she moved towards him, large eyes and pale worried face, soothing voice saying the same thing over and over until he realized it was his name.

"Scott. Scott. It's okay. You're okay, Scott." Allison, getting closer to him than any sane person should have when all he could see was red. The smell of her overpowering the scent of the beast and the scent of the blood. The scent of her bringing sanity back in bits and pieces. She laid hands on him, her fingers soft and gentle, the faintest scrape of calluses on the pads of the fingers she used to draw a bowstring.

He let out a shuddery breath that verged on a sob.

"He's okay," her eyes flicked past him to the owner of the arm around his neck. Derek. And Scott didn't know where he'd come from or why he was here and couldn't find it in himself to really care. Derek slowly loosened his hold, not as trusting as Allison. More aware maybe, of just how badly Scott was teetering on the edge.

Isaac hovered behind her, clutching his arm. His sleeve was ripped and bloody. Scott had maybe done that. The source of the blood on his hands was indistinguishable. Allison, Isaac, Derek - - the only one missing was - -

"Stiles?" He recalled in a flash of disjointed imagery Stiles taking a glancing blow from the vanago. He saw him, sprawled against the flat back tire of the old tractor. And the only thing he could think was how long those claws were when they'd been swiping at him. The damage they could do to a human body that didn't have the benefit of supernatural healing, was horrifyingly evident in the scattered remains of Dupont's men.

"God - -" He twisted out from under Derek's hand and headed that way.

He skidded to his knees in the dirt next to him, trying to hear a pulse, but stymied by the overpowering thud of his own heartbeat drowning out the finer points of his hearing. He half heard Allison warning not to move him, in case he was injured, was half aware of her hovering behind him, but things were going in and out of clarity a little and had been for a long time.

He felt for a pulse the old fashioned way, growling in purely human frustration at the manacles that made doing anything difficult. But it was there, steady under his fingertips. He sagged, hands sliding down, clutching at the edge of Stiles' jacket. He dropped his head, shoulders shaking. Everything shaking. It was difficult distinguishing between the lingering tremors of real pain from the acid still dispersing in his bloodstream, and the ghostly echoes of past experiences of the same.

He squeezed his eyes shut and rocked, digging fingers into the cloth of Stiles' jacket.

"Dude, what the hell is up with that collar?" Stiles' voice, wavery and a little disjointed, as if he were having trouble stringing words together. Scott looked up, and Stiles blinked at him, a little unfocused.

He laughed, this miserable aborted sound that tasted like blood and pressed the top of his head against Stiles' shoulder.

Stiles lifted a hand to the back of his neck, above the collar and said with soft ferocity. "The bastard's dead."

Allison sank down, close to his back, her hand on his side. He flinched a little at the touch. He couldn't help it.

"Scott," she said softly. "My father's coming. And Stiles' father with his men. We need to get out of here. That thing is out there. My dad will know how to kill it if we can find it."

She sounded so sure. He didn't share her optimism. He'd already thought it dead once. He lifted his head, meeting Stiles' eyes. Stiles knew how much damage they'd done to the thing before.

"C'mon." Derek had less patience. He hauled them both up. Stiles wavered, putting a hand against the tractor as his balance deserted him. Lifting the other to the back of his head and bringing it back with blood on his fingers.

"Oh, that can't be good." He sounded a more than a little dazed. Scott stared at the red on his fingers, less than focused himself, until Derek caught his arm and tried to get the manacles off him.

It took Derek and Isaac both to get the things off. Once free, he ripped the collar off himself, flinging it across the barn with enough force that it embedded itself into the wall. His neck felt raw where it had been, but maybe that was just ghost memory, too.

Allison got them moving, her crossbow in one hand, the other latching hold of his hand, tugging to urge him into motion. He cast a passing glance at Dupont's corpse as they passed. The horrific mess the beast had made of him littered the ground around his body. Stiles made a gagging sound and staggered a little into him. Then the stagger turned into a knee giving out and Scott got an arm around him before he crumpled.

He should have known something was wrong from the silence. Stiles was never this quiet for this long. Especially not when nerves were in play. Stiles was muttering now, 'fuck, fuck, oh - -fuck - -' in soft little panting gasps, his eyes out of focus, his fingers grasping at Scott's shoulder.

"What's wrong? Stiles - - what's wrong?"

"Ah - - God, I'm gonna puke - -"

"He might be concussed," Allison said.

"Just come on. There's somebody coming," Derek growled, getting under Stiles' other arm and moving them along whether Stiles was ready to go or not.

"If I do puke, I'm aiming for you," Stiles mumbled at Derek.

Outside the barn, cold, fresh air diluted the concentrated stench of blood and death. He didn't know where he was. An old house, a dark field and darker woods beyond it.

"There's a car missing," Allison remarked, as she paced outside the barn in front of them. Isaac was ranging a little further to their right, eyes scanning the dark line of woods.

"It went that way - - I think," he said. Then. "It wasn't the only one. Somebody else ran that way, too."

One of Dupont's men maybe, who had escaped the massacre and run for the forest. If the vanago was on his trail, he was a dead man. Scott couldn't find it in himself to care. He just wanted out of here. He wanted _his_ people out of here and safe. He wanted Stiles to be okay. He wanted to find someplace dark and private to curl into knot until the screams in his head quieted down.

There was a truck, a big, dark SUV coming down the dirt road leading alongside the woods towards the house. Not a sheriff's vehicle for sure. They all tensed, until Allison said, 'that's my dad,' and walked a few paces down the drive waiting for the vehicle.

It rolled to a stop and Chris Argent got out. There were two other guys with him, all of them armed to the teeth. Allison's branch of the family wasn't in the werewolf hunting business anymore - - at least not random, innocent wolves - - but her dad still had resources. Contacts, she had told him once, that would back them if they needed.

"There are bodies in the barn. Julian Dupont is one of them." Allison was giving her father a quick, concise rundown. "The thing that attacked Scott and Stiles up north did it. It got away. It's injured. Isaac says it went that way."

"It won't be injured for long," her father said.

"I put a lot of bolts into it. So maybe long enough, if we can track it down."

"As long as it's bleeding, we can track it," Derek said and Isaac moved closer, nodding in silent agreement.

Scott's gut clenched. He didn't want them tracking it. He didn't want them anywhere near it. Let Argent deal with it from a distance if he could. Let the thing run until it crossed the state line. And took how many innocent victims on its way? It reveled in the kill. He'd seen it in its eyes. It wouldn't be a bloodless flight, even if it ran and continued to run. There would be casualties - - bodies left in its wake. His fault for not killing it permanently in the first place.

He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling its teeth at his throat - -remembering that moment when he knew he was about to die. Not the only moment that thought had crossed his mind today. Had it just been a day? He didn't know. Everything spinning out of control. Going dark around the edges.

"Scott - - Scott - -let go - -" Stiles' voice got to him. He realized his grip on Stiles' wrist was grinding bones. He let him go, let Derek take his weight, staggering a step away. His heart felt like it was beating against his rib cage in a bid for escape.

"I'm sorry. Sorry," he whispered it.

"We need to get them out of here," Allison said, staring at him, worried. "We need to get Stiles to the ER."

"Take the truck," Argent said. "We'll track the vanago."

"'m okay," Stiles protested, sounding a little slurred.

"Shut up," Derek suggested. Then to Argent. "I'll go with you. It may take more than bullets."

Argent gave him a grim look, little enough love lost for Derek. "I have very effective bullets - -but point taken."

"Blew its brains out - - and it got back up - -" Stiles chimed in. "How do you get up when there's brain chunks on the ground?"

Derek hauled him to the SUV and shoved him into the backseat. Stiles sort of toppled over and lay there, palms pressed over his eyes.

"I'll go with Derek," Isaac said.

"No," Scott almost growled it. He didn't want Isaac facing that thing. He didn't want any of them facing it, but Isaac wasn't the fighter Derek was. Isaac's aggression tended to be blind and impulsive and occasionally awkward, and that didn't make for high odds of survival against something like the vanago. And he couldn't simultaneously worry about Isaac and Stiles - - not now.

Isaac blinked at him, not getting it, his blood still up, ready to keep on hunting, even though he had no idea how deadly the thing out there was. Even wounded.

"Okay, I'll go, too." Scott didn't have a choice, even though his knees felt weak and everything was wavering just a little around the edges.

"No," Allison said sharply.

"No," Isaac echoed, both of them adamant on that count.

"Don't be an idiot," Derek had had enough. "Out of all that blood in there, a lot of its yours. Flesh heals. Blood takes longer. Just go to the ER with Stiles." He jerked his head at Isaac, maybe understanding where Scott's difficulties lay. "You too."

Isaac nodded, a little wary. A little worried furrow between his brows.

"We're wasting time," Argent said, motioning to his men. "If any of you are here when the sheriff arrives, there's only so much he can do to keep you out of it with this many bodies involved. Now go!"

# # #

Somewhere along the way to the hospital, Scott lost time. He half recalled getting into the back seat of the SUV with Stiles, but the ride there was one big blank. Like his mind had been someplace his body couldn't get.

They must have called his mom, because she was pacing outside the ER entrance when Allison pulled up. She just looked at him, swallowed back whatever was on the tip of her tongue and turned to Stiles, who was still in the back, taking his face and looking into his eyes.

"Stiles? How many fingers?" She held up two.

He stared at her hand, before shutting his eyes and groaning. "Trick question, right?"

"What day is it?"

"Another trick question," he muttered. "It's night."

"Has he lost consciousness?"

"Just the once," Allison supplied the answer to that. "But he took a really hard hit. He's nauseous and faint headed."

"Okay. We're gonna get you inside and get a head CT." She waved to an orderly loitering outside the emergency room doors. "Don't think I didn't see that cigarette, Doug. I need some help over here."

Allison and Isaac were hovering, edging between him and the orderly, and it took him a second to realize it was because of the blood. Blood on his skin, blood soaking his jeans to the point that they were stiff with it.

"Do you want to go home?" Allison asked.

"No." He wasn't leaving until he knew Stiles was okay. Worrying about Stiles gave him something to focus on other than the gibbering chaos at the back of his mind.

"Okay," she said, and went and rummaged in the back of the SUV and pulled out an old army jacket that smelled of her father. "Put this on. It'll cover up some of the - -" she trailed off, staring into his eyes, distraught.

Blood. Cover up the blood.

He shrugged into the jacket, avoiding her gaze, avoiding that look in Allison's eyes that he could barely deal with when he wasn't on the verge of crumbling into a thousand scattered bits and pieces. She could wreck him on a good day with a smile and a look that meant nothing to her anymore - - and today wasn't a good day.

He started in and his mom stopped him, a hand on his chest. He could feel her hand trembling through the contact, could hear the frantic beat of her pulse. "How much of this blood is yours?"

He didn't want to tell her. He wouldn't burden her with the knowledge. They didn't both need nightmares keeping them up at night. "Just a little, mom."

She stared up at him, dark eyes liquid with pain that he'd caused her. Looking at her was almost as hard as looking at Allison.

"Sorry, mom. Sorry. I screwed up." He didn't know what else to say and he must have, somewhere along the way for this to have gotten so terribly out of hand.

She let out a breath and hugged him like she was trying to squeeze all the air out of his lungs. "Its not your fault, baby," she said against his shoulder.

He heard the catch in her voice and it was like a hammer blow to the chest, stealing all his breath. All his intention. He stared over her head at the blank wall beside the hospital doors, trying to gather up the shreds of his self-control. Trying not to break in the ER driveway. She was making it really hard.

Then she pulled away, her hand still on the lapel of his borrowed jacket, gathering her own wits. "Okay. Okay. You can't go through the ER looking like this - - you need to get cleaned up and put something on that doesn't look like you've been bathing in blood."

"Stiles - -"

"Stiles is in good hands. No arguments. You come with me."

She led them all through a side entrance, down a service hallway lined with idle equipment and unused gurneys and wheelchairs. Part of the old wing that didn't get a lot of use now. They passed a single janitor that gave them a bored look, but not much more, busy listening to his earbuds and pushing a cart of supplies.

There was an empty room with a shower that she directed him to while Isaac and Allison loitered outside in the hall, Allison talking softly on her cell with her father. Scott could have taken the effort and listened to what they were saying - - but he didn't really want to know. Not now.

"Shower." His mom directed, as if he might not have picked up on what he was supposed to do. "I'll get you some scrubs to put on."

She gave him a little push when he stalled, a jerk of her head towards the shower stall, before pulling the door closed behind her on her way out.

He stood there a moment, lost. Just him in a sterile hospital bathroom with a florescent bulb on the verge of going out, buzzing overhead. He caught his reflection in the mirror and almost didn't recognize it. Blood smeared on his face. His skin stained with it between the lapels of the jacket. Crusting down his stomach where it had welled, over and over while Dupont carved into his flesh.

He shuddered, looking away. Shed the jacket and with a sudden fit of revulsion, tore at his jeans. He couldn't get them off fast enough, kicking them and equally blood soaked boxers away. Stepping into the shower and cutting the water on, not even caring that it was cold. He scrubbed at the blood and it swirled around his feet, pink residue disappearing down the drain. Even free of it, he wasn't clean enough, he could still feel the slither of Dupont's hands on his skin. The stench of the man's breath against his neck and the soap wouldn't wash it away.

He slid down the wall, sat there with the water sluicing down on his head, fingers clutching at his hair, trying to breath. But there was water stinging his eyes, water running down his throat and it tasted like blood. And it smelled like blood and he couldn't shake it from his mind. He pressed his forehead against his knees and ground his teeth to keep from screaming.

"Scott? Are you okay?"

Soft voice at the door. Allison. He drew in a shaky, wet breath, wondering if maybe he'd been screaming after all. He grabbed hold of the bar on the shower wall and pulled himself up. Cut off the water and stood there, trying to regather focus.

"Fine. I'm fine." He could hear her breath, the beat of her heart on the other side of the door, the faint sound of her fingers curling on the wood. There was a pair of blue hospital scrubs on the bench inside the bathroom door. He hadn't heard anyone come in and place them there, which was disconcerting in and of itself.

When he came out, she was leaning against the foot of the bed. Just her. No sign of his mom or Isaac. His expression must have asked, because she answered without a verbal prompt.

"Your mom went to check on Stiles. Isaac has an issue with hospitals. He's outside, probably pacing a groove in the cement." She attempted a smile, but it faltered. "You were in there a long time."

He swallowed, not even knowing how to begin explaining that. Not wanting to.

"There was a lot of blood," he said helplessly.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I think I'm gonna have to toss the jeans - -"

He broke off. She lowered her head, staring at him from under her lashes, jaw working.

"You always do this," she said softly. "Try to protect everybody but yourself."

She stepped up to him, hesitantly touching fingertips to his chest, not meeting his eyes. He shut his eyes, wishing she'd back up and give him space to breathe.

"You need to stop. You need to - -" she stopped abruptly, tangling the front of his scrubs in her fist, swallowing hard.

"Pain makes us stronger," she said, as though it were something she'd been reciting to herself. "You don't get to shoulder it all. All you do when you try to protect people from pain is make them weaker for it."

He didn't know what to say to that. Maybe he was just emotionally wrecked, maybe she was a little as well, because it almost sounded like accusation.

"Hey."

He started at the sound of his mom's voice from the doorway. Allison stepped back from him, chin up, eyes shielded.

His mom stared between the two of them for a beat, then said. "So the results of the CT are in and so far there's nothing serious. But he does have a concussion and brain trauma is tricky, so we're keeping him at least overnight for observation. I called his dad, by the way, which none of you thought to do."

"Oh," Allison said, sounding guilty at the slip.

"He can't come in right now, because apparently he's dealing with something horrible. Bloodbath and mutilated bodies were two of the terms he used. Does that have something to do with what happened to you?"

He nodded mutely. She put a hand to her mouth, trying to comprehend things she only had the barest understanding of.

"Can I see him?" He wanted her mind off him and onto Stiles.

"You can, but he's not going to be much for conversation. The brain needs to slow down and rest to heal and I'm not sure Stiles' brain is capable of slowing down - - so I made sure he got a sedative."

"I'm going to go find Isaac," Allison said, forcing a fleeting smile for his mom, but not looking him in the eye.

His mom urged him out into the hall after her. She kept casting worried glances up at him, that he kept trying to ignore. It was way past normal visiting hours and if his mom hadn't been with him, the on duty nurses would have chased him off. She stopped, talking softly with them at the station. He didn't need her to find Stiles' room. Even with all the smells of antiseptic and sickness, he could pick up that scent.

Dark room, two beds, but one of them was empty. Stiles was in the other. Even breathing. Steady heart beat. Still and quiet. The only times Stiles was ever still and quiet was when he was asleep. Even when he was awake and not actually talking there was an energy that radiated off him in waves. He had a bruise that Scott hadn't noticed before on his face, but other than that, he looked peaceful.

There was a long, vinyl covered window seat, looking out over the scenic rooftop of the lower wing. He sat down, his back to the sill, letting himself uncoil in the dark of the room to the sound of Stiles' even breathing. He lifted a hand, touching his neck, half expecting blisters and welts in the place where the collar had been. He could still feel the sting of it in bright little flashes of tactile memory. He clenched his fist, shuddering, and leaned his head against the cold glass of the window.

Derek had said it took time for blood to replenish and that felt about right, because he was wasted. Just drained. It rushed up on him now that there was nothing to keep the adrenalin flowing. No imminent threat lurking outside the door. Just the sound of his mom's voice, distinguishable from the others outside in the hall, the curious music of a hospital at night. The comforting sound of Stiles at rest.

He didn't want to shut his eyes in fear of the things lurking just below the layer of consciousness, things he could barely keep at bay tonight even fully conscious. But then what he wanted and what he'd gotten lately had been entirely separate things.


	9. Chapter 9

9

Allison hadn't meant to say that to him. Not when he had that bruised look in his eyes and that faint tremor that kept making his hands shake. But her control had been strung so taut today that it felt frayed around the edges. And she'd been scared. And fear, when it stayed with you for hours and hours, took its toll on simple things like tact and the keeping of truths close to your heart.

And he'd triggered it. That one last denial that he was anything but fine, just to keep her from worrying had ripped open things that weren't even close to healing inside her. That attempt to divert her from the fact that he'd been barely holding it together had just broken something open inside her.

And it had been truth what she'd said. Long held truth, and he _did_ do it all the time. Tried to protect people from pain, whether they needed to be protected or not. Like with her mother. She'd gone all summer, thinking her mother an innocent victim. All summer trying to get past the murderous rage her grandfather had so skillfully kindled. Hating Derek Hale, hating werewolves in general for a while, Scott included - - because somehow they all must have been culpable. When really - - they hadn't been culpable at all. Not Derek, no matter how much she tensed up still when she saw him - - not Isaac or Derek's other less than fortunate pack mates - - certainly not Scott - - who'd been trying to save a life when her mother had tried to take his. And yeah, she resented him for that omission. For putting her before himself. For treating her like a fragile little girl who couldn't handle the truth, when she'd needed the truth more than anything. And maybe she had been that naïve girl when she'd met him. But she wasn't anymore.

Maybe that's why Isaac was such easy company. He didn't underestimate her. He didn't think she needed his protection. And maybe that was because he'd learned the hard way just how well she could take care for herself.

But Scott was getting better. Better at acknowledging her for what she was capable of. Better at trusting her to carry her own weight, even if she didn't have claws and supernatural strength and speed. And maybe, like it was in Isaac's nature to go with the flow and let the chips fall where they might, it was in Scott's to shoulder the burdens of his own little slice of the world. Which wasn't a terrible thing. She loved that about him. That unshakable sense of duty that he'd developed somewhere along the way.

What drove her crazy with frustration was when he let it work to his own detriment.

Isaac was coming around the corner of the Emergency wing when she came out, like he'd been making the circuit of the hospital.

"How is he?"

She knew he wasn't asking about Stiles.

"He says he's okay." She wasn't willing to go into her Scott-related peeves.

"He's not," Isaac said, as if there were no question.

"Probably not." She agreed. "Stiles is okay, too. They're keeping him over night."

Isaac stuffed hands in his pockets and looked up at the hospital with furrow browed intensity. "I don't like hospitals. They smell like death. He ought to go home."

Again, it wasn't Stiles he was talking about.

"Lydia's here."

"Yeah?" She'd called her on the way here to let her know that her death premonition hadn't included any of their own.

"She's inside. They wouldn't let her past the waiting room in the ER."

"Okay. I'm going to go find her. Are you staying out here?"

He nodded, leaning up against the hood of somebody else's car.

She walked into the public ER entrance. At past eleven on a weekday night, it was sluggish. Only a few people waiting in the hard backed chairs of the waiting room and none of them seeming in need of medical care. Lydia was at the admissions desk, arguing with the nurse behind the counter.

"All I'm asking for is a little actual helpful information," Lydia was saying, waving a hand at the room in general. "Its not like you've got people screaming for your attention."

The steely-eyed nurse looked up from her paperwork and replied deadpan. "Just one. I'll let you know something when I know something."

"Lydia," Allison moved up beside her. "He's okay. They're both okay."

Lydia took a breath, eyes flickering closed for a moment, before she looked back at Allison with faintly annoyed green eyes. "Where have you been? Isaac is about as helpful as the plague."

"With Scott. Stiles has a concussion, but they're not worried that it's anything serious. They're keeping him overnight just to be safe, though."

"Hmm, At least someone seems to be in the loop." Lydia cast a derisive look at the nurse, who ignored her. "Can we see him?"

"Visiting hours start at 9 am." The nurse helpfully pointed out.

Lydia narrowed her eyes. The nurse narrowed hers back. Allison latched hold of Lydia's arm and pulled her away from the counter.

"I know I'm next to useless in a fight," Lydia complained as they headed towards the glass doors. "But I'm really starting to hate being the last person to know what's going on."

Allison cast her a wan smile. "You're sort of the first person on the scene a lot of times."

Lydia waved a hand, sniffing dismissively. "Oh, I'm not saying I want to be anywhere near blood being shed - - I'm just pointing out that I'd like to not have to wait two hours before I know whether my friends are all in one piece or not."

"I'm sorry. I should have - - I've just been - - distracted. It's been a crazy night."

"Hmm. I guess it does put things in perspective."

"What do you mean?"

Lydia shrugged. "You leave the guy you're currently doing whatever it is that you're doing with, waiting outside, because you can't stand to leave the side of the one you dumped last year."

Allison opened her mouth. Shut it a little indignantly, before replying. "Scott was kidnapped and possibly tortured, so I think a little concern was warranted."

"I'm just saying."

"Yeah? Well what about the girl who's dating one guy and so worried about another one that she practically gets into a brawl with the nurse who won't let her see him?"

"Oh please." Lydia rolled her eyes. "I don't do brawls. And I'm not dating anyone. And Stiles is a friend. Just a friend who I'm justifiably concerned about."

"Well, Scott's mine."

Lydia lifted a brow.

"Friend." Allison ground her teeth and clarified, glancing across the parking lot at Isaac and hoping his attention was firmly elsewhere, because the last thing she needed was him picking up on this conversation.

"Well then." Lydia smiled tightly. "Now that we've got that cleared up, you can tell me what happened in a little more detail than you managed to squeeze into a ninety second phone call."

# # #

Stiles woke up with a headache. The sort of epic, throbbing headache that transcended sleep and chased you right into unconsciousness. The sun coming in through the window wasn't helping.

He lay there a moment, wallowing in his misery, before it occurred to him that the bed was sort of hard and the room was sort of awful - - as hospital rooms tended to be - - and that he wasn't alone. Scott was sprawled in the window seat nook, one of those thin hospital blankets thrown over him, dead to the world.

Stiles shut his eyes, blowing out a breath, relief welling up. They were okay. They were all okay and for a while there, he'd really doubted. A nurse came in, looking way too energetic for what the clock on the wall claimed was 8 o'clock in the morning. She gave him a look that suggested she was surprised to see him up, tossed another look towards Scott and started doing efficient, nurse-type things. Like taking his vitals and asking how he was feeling this morning. Still dizzy? Nauseous? Headache?

She seemed genuinely disinterested at his answers and promised Tylenol with breakfast, before she marched off to perform the same procedure with the next patient.

Scott hadn't stirred throughout the duration of her visit. But then Scott, despite the fact that he could hear a tack drop a block away, tended to be a deep sleeper. And Scott had had a pretty grueling day yesterday. A miserable, terrible day, if what little Stiles had seen while all hell was breaking loose in that barn was any indication.

"Hey, Scott," he called softly. Scott didn't move, so he went a little louder. "Scotty, wake up!"

That did it. Scott started, jerking up in a panic, blinking with distinct disorientation. There was a flash of red in his eyes that, if the nurse had still been in the room, would have just been lovely for her to behold.

"Dude, calm down. It's just me."

Scott stared at him, breath coming shallow and fast, before he dropped his head onto his hands, forcibly slowing it down.

"Asshole," he muttered.

"Sorry," Stiles admitted, figuring rude awakenings were probably not the best way to go with Scott right now.

"You okay?"

"My head's pounding like a frackin' marching band's running practice trials inside my skull - - but hey, I'm alive. How about you?"

Scott shrugged, the sheerest hint of evasion in his eyes and that spoke just volumes and volumes to someone who knew the little signs. "I will be."

Stiles stared at him, chewing that over. "What did he do to you?"

Scott sat back in the corner of the window seat, fixing Stiles with a critical glance. "My mom said you're supposed to be resting your brain. Why don't you try that?"

Stiles kept staring, until Scott turned to look out the window, finding something fascinating to look at outside. "Nothing," he said softly. "Nothing I want to talk about right now."

Stiles got the impression that the 'right now' in that admission, translated to 'ever'. But what Scott wanted and what Scott needed were two different things. If Stiles head hadn't hurt so badly he might have pushed. He wasn't up to matching stubborn streaks with Scott at the moment, though. The pressure behind his eyes was pretty horrible and he seriously doubted a couple of Tylenol's were going to drive it away anytime soon. His shoulder still ached and his ribs on the right side felt like somebody had maybe been doing a little dance on them. Either than or an enraged, supernatural bear-beast had backhanded him into a tractor with a paw the size of a frying pan. Either or.

He narrowed his eyes, trying to remember details from last night. He hoped it was just last night and he hadn't been lying here in some sort of coma for longer than that. It made his head pound a little more energetically trying to pick out detail from hazy memory. There had been an awful lot of bodies strewn about, an awful lot of blood. And for a kid who didn't like anything to do with the stuff unless it was safely running through the vein, it had been pretty sickening.

Dupont had been the worst. Watching that thing tear him apart had been one of the most gruesome things he'd ever witnessed. No matter the guy probably deserved it ten times over, Stiles would still have nightmares about it in glaring, Technicolor detail.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to recall details on the other pertinent part of the Dupont equation.

"Do you remember seeing Jan Dupont when we were leaving? I don't remember seeing her."

Scott glanced his way slowly, like his mind had been firmly entrenched elsewhere. He thought for a second, then shook his head. "No. I wasn't - - I don't remember."

"Its okay," Stiles assured him. "It's just, I remember Allison shooting her, but not much after that."

"He sent her to kill you," Scott said hollowly. "I thought - - I thought she had."

"Dude - - " Stiles was stymied for a moment, thinking that if anything would have hit Scott harder than physical suffering, it would have been the emotional distress of his friends being in trouble and him not able to do a damn thing to stop it. Then it hit him. "That bitch shot me. First she cuts me. Then she shoots me."

Scott blinked at him. "You got shot?"

"Yes!"

"You got shot?" the echo of that question came from the doorway of the room and was laced with a hell of a lot more annoyed surprise than Scott had put into his question.

His dad stood there, looking haggard enough that it was a safe bet he'd either gotten no sleep or only the barest few hours. Suffice to say, he did not look happy.

"Uhh - -" Stiles floundered. "Well - - technically the bullet sort of flew past - - "

"Twelve hours. Twelve hours and we've got enough bodies to fill the morgue - - put there by something - -" and he stabbed a finger at both him and Scott, "That all of us will damn sure be having a discussion about - - and not only am I told that my son has been admitted to the hospital for a head injury, now I find out he's been shot to boot?"

"Yeah, sort of a sucky, day, huh?" Stiles laughed weakly.

His father glowered at him, but it didn't stop him from stomping up and putting a hand on his shoulder and staring down critically. Like he could tell, just by looking into his eyes, whether he was really okay or not. After a minute, once he was satisfied, he looked over to Scott.

"Are you all right?"

Scott nodded, this wary, hooded look in his eyes like he was afraid his dad was going to start grilling him here and now.

"I came by last night as soon as I could," his dad said. "But you were already out and I didn't want to disturb you. You were both out."

"Did you find a woman among the bodies?"

"There would have been two," Scott said. "Two women."

Stiles glanced his way, not aware of a second woman in the group.

But his father nixed the notion, anyway. "No. There were five bodies in the barn. Another two we found outside. All men. One of them was definitely Julian Dupont."

He looked around, making sure there were no loitering hospital personal near the door and leaned in to whisper. "The thing that did that? Not a werewolf?"

"The thing that did that makes your average werewolf look like a Chihuahua with a bad attitude." Stiles said.

"Argent's tracking it," Scott said. "You don't want your people near it."

"It ripped apart seven men. That we know of. We don't have a choice."

"Yeah, and that's after they emptied like a whole truckload of bullets into it and if that's not a good reason to avoid it, I don't know what is," Stiles said. Panicking about his dad going out there looking for that thing was making the blood pound in an alarming way behind his temples. He winced, pressing a palm to his head.

"Okay," his father said. "That's it. You're supposed to avoid agitation. And all of this - - is agitating."

"Yeah, well, easier said than done," Stiles groused.

"Scott, you need to go home. Your mother's around here somewhere and has been all night. Find her and take her home. Stiles, you will get some rest if I have to shove a handful of sedatives down your throat personally. If the doctor okays it, we'll get you discharged this afternoon."

Stiles gaped indignantly, but Scott rose, nodding at his father.

"He's right. Just calm down. Get some sleep."

"My head hurts too much to sleep. Call me when you get home."

"No smartphone." His father said and clapped his hand down on Stiles' cell, which lay on the bedside table along with his wallet, and the contents of his pockets neatly stuffed into a plastic baggie. "The Doctor said as little mental stimulus as possible, which means, no computer, no networking with your friends or playing online games until the doctor tells me its safe for you to do so."

Stiles gaped. "So, I'm being punished?"

"No, you're not being punished - -" his dad exclaimed, frustrated.

Scott looked at him somberly and said. "Stiles, just do it."

# # #

A night's sleep had washed away the lingering shivers of pain. That sense of weakness in his limbs, probably from copious blood loss, had faded as well. It was almost like nothing terrible had been done to his body at all. He could almost, if he tried hard enough, disconnect himself from the sharp little stabs of memory that came upon him unawares. It wasn't even that difficult, because recollection was oddly shrouded in a hazy sort of numb. And there were other things to worry about. Like Stiles being physically incapable of following medical advice. Like his mom, driving herself into exhaustion worrying about him. Like the vanago still out there on the loose somewhere and Dupont's sister still at large.

He didn't have the luxury to focus inward and maybe that was a good thing.

Since his mom had been at the hospital anyway and missed half a day's work yesterday, she'd switched with another nurse and worked the graveyard shift. Scott found her in the on call room, asleep on a cot. He almost hated to wake her up, she looked so exhausted.

"Mom?" He crouched by the cot. She opened her eyes, looked at him and blew out a breath of relief that suggested that maybe she'd been having dreams where he wasn't all right. He regretted being the cause of nightmares for her.

"You wanna go home?"

She glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and half laughed. "Considering I have to be back here at 4. God, yes."

So they home they went. He sat slouched in the passenger seat while she tried not to ask him a hundred questions. She wanted to, he could practically see the need to understand what had happened to him radiating off her, but she knew him well enough to see he wasn't willing or able to talk about it. So she drove in relative silence and he loved her for it.

Isaac wasn't in the house when they got home, but it was a school day and after nine, so it was a good guess he was actually attending class. His mom headed for her bedroom to crash another few hours before she had to get back up again. Scott fiddled in the kitchen, staring for way too long at the contents of the refrigerator trying to find something that appealed. Normally he could eat anything. This morning, he was having trouble reconciling the grumbling emptiness of his stomach to the roiling disinterest in his mind at the very idea of consuming any of the various leftovers in the 'fridge.

He settled for a granola bar, tearing the foil off and munching, on his way upstairs and into his room, which was dim and cool and welcoming. Except for the man in the chair in the corner.

Scott took a sharp breath, an instinctive step backwards and just managed to keep the claws in. Barely.

"Damnit, Derek. Stop doing that."

One of Derek's brows twitched minutely. He had one of Scott's summer improvement reading projects in his lap, as if he'd been sitting here long enough to become bored enough to peruse it. He tilted the cover of 'Call of the Wild', with another brow twitch that translated into a silent 'really?'

Scott wanted silently to suggest he 'fuck off' but he took a breath instead and asked. "So?"

"We lost the trail," Derek said matter of factly. "It just stopped dead. No tracks, no scent. Argent's going to keep on it, but I think it's a waste of time." He tossed the book and rose, reaching for something on the floor next to him as he did. It was a collar. Twice the size or more of the one Dupont had put on him. Derek tossed it at him.

"We found this."

Scott hissed, not wanting to touch the thing, but catching it by reflex anyway. It was cold and venomous in his hands. Thick, unforgiving steel that had seen better days. It was twisted now and pitted with a set deep gouges. He hadn't taken the time to examine his, before he'd flung it away from him, but on this one, he could see the little row of ports lining the inside, a few of which had the tips of heavy grade needles protruding.

His chest seized up, breath refusing to come. He stood there, clenching it in his fists, the world narrowed down to this tiny tunnel of vision centered around the unique perspective of having similar needles jammed into his own neck.

Derek snapped him out of it, growling his name, a lot closer than he 'd been the last time Scott had been capable of focusing on anything other than the collar.

Scott blinked at him, and Derek stared back, frowning. Gauging him.

"It's smart," Derek finally said. "It wasn't running blindly. It was using every trick in the book to elude us."

"Dupont said it was old. A hundred years almost. Long enough to pick up a trick or two."

Derek shrugged. "The old ones are the worst. It doesn't mean they don't make mistakes. It'll leave a trail eventually."

"A trail of bodies?"

Another shrug. "The other problem with the old ones. Habits die hard."

Scott looked away, all too familiar with the thing's lust for violence. If it started killing people - - innocent people - - he couldn't ignore it. And he couldn't deal with it on his own. That had already been made abundantly clear. It would rip him up. It would rip up the people he loved.

His pulse was pounding again, a wild rush in his veins. The collar in his hands was making his skin twitch. He'd thought he could hold it at bay. Very carefully, he laid it on his desk.

"Are you staying?" Softly asked. He was almost afraid of the answer. Derek had other obligations. He had a sister, and Beacon Hills hadn't been kind to him. Beacon Hills had body slammed him to the ground more times than one. It was pure selfishness to wish him to ignore those things just because a man and his psychotic beast had driven a fear into Scott that he couldn't shake.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I am."

Derek surprised him. Scott let out a silent breath of relief.

Then Derek surprised him again, by saying. "What happened to you - - it heals quick on the outside. Inside," and he tapped his own temple. "It stays with you. It'll fester if you let it. So don't let it. Don't sit here in the dark and let it eat at you. Go to school. Talk to your friends. Do what you have to do."

That bit of advice coming from Derek was ironic, Derek having issues with open, honest and frank communication himself. But then, Maybe Derek knew first hand.

Scott shrugged. "I'll be okay."

"I know."

# # #

_There was a wolf on her trail. And men with guns. Men like the Man with the skills to track even a wily predator. If she fell back on instinct and the urges of the beast, she was lost. The pain drove her. The bullets of the men she could expel, but the bolts the bitch with the bow had driven into her, were lodged in her body. Some she could get at with her teeth. Others were beyond her reach. At least the way her body was now. She remembered a time when her hands had been clever and her fingers wondrously dexterous. She longed for that mobility again. _

_She crouched, perched on a flat rock, muscles contracting around the bolts lodged in her flesh, and for the first time since she'd become a beast, was aware enough to long for the human form she'd once worn. _

_And she felt a change. An intrinsic gathering of energy that ebbed through her bones, though her veins, triggering a shift in her reality that had only ever happened once. The day the curse had been laid upon her._

_It came with a price, that transformation. A burning ache of muscle and bone and flesh that had been fixed for so long in one shape, taking the form of another. She roared, as her bones bent. As skin burned and twisted and folded in upon itself. The roar turned into a scream and that dwindled off into labored breathing as she knelt there, hairless human hands splayed on the cold surface of the rock. _

_She laughed, staring down at them. At long, dirty nails. At pale skin as fragile seeming as any prey she had hunted through the years. She felt that fragility in the points of pain still burning in her body. The bolt in her back she yanked out with a hiss and gush of blood. The one in her chest - - the one her wolf had driven deep inside her when he'd attacked, she had to dig for. _

_She ran afterwards, naked as a newborn, afraid to stay too long in one place. Bounding from one outcropping of rock to another, to confuse the men following her. It was cold here, but she'd suffered colder. Her wounds healed as she moved and the hated collar, once snug, bounced loose around her neck. She paused long enough to twist it off. Her hands though human soft were still strong. The metal folded in her grip and she tossed it away. The last remnant of the Man himself. But not the last price he would pay for what she had endured at his hands. The bitch who smelled of him - -his sister, she realized now that human mentality was hers once more - - had not been among her victims. _

_And she would be. That one last piece of old business to take care of, before she turned her attention to more interesting game. _


	10. Chapter 10

**Author's Note**

After consideration, (and after the fact) it seemed that the last chapter of Vendetta was the natural place to close out that part of the story, before beginning the third installment. Most of the main Dupont story lines had been wrapped and the vanago issues will be dealt with in the final installment, titled, appropriately enough, "Vanago".

So as not to leave all the folks who've already read chapter 9 hanging, wondering where the next chapter was, I thought I'd explain why the story had a suddenly been marked 'complete'.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of "Vanago". The entire chapter is also up under that title.

Thanks so much for reading and especially to all the folks who've been kind enough to feed an author's ego and leave feedback.

**Vanago**

**1**

Her name was Zlata Barinov and she'd been born on the streets of Kiev under the rule of the last Tsar of Russia. She had grown up and plied her trade amidst the bloody series of revolutions that burned across all the Russias. A cutpurse and a whore with a face like the stone angels in the cathedral of St. Volodymyr, who had found herself on the wrong side of the Bolsheviks when the revolutionaries toppled the Emperor's loyalists.

All this she remembered, after more years than she could comprehend, trapped in the shape of a beast, with a beast's mentality and a beast's inability to grasp the concept of time. And time had passed. A great deal of time. The world had changed, and she had changed with it. A hundred years a beast and the urges of the beast still lingered. The instincts still pulled at her, even as her human brain struggled to integrate with her new reality. She had been a predator before a Gypsy hag had cursed her with the last blood speckled breath from her wrinkled lips and turned her into a predator in form as well as mind. That hadn't changed. She was still that predator. The thrill of the kill still made her blood thrum, whether it be slitting the throat of a man who'd paid to lie between her thighs, or hunting down prey and ripping soft, vulnerable flesh with teeth and claws.

It was all the same. Men were still the same as they had always been. Loosing their sense of caution and reason at the sight of a pretty face. Much less the sight of a naked body stumbling out of the woods along the side of the road.

The truck screeched to a halt, the man behind the wheel gaping. He climbed out, approaching her carefully.

"You all right?" He couldn't take his eyes off her, even as he asked the question. He had a soft, pear-shaped body and thinning hair. "You hurt? Can I help you?"

Her grasp of English was precarious. There had been an English diplomat that enjoyed certain _perversions_ that had kept her for half a year in comfort, in rooms on the nicer side of Kiev. She had picked up a rudimentary understanding of the language. But then, he hadn't wanted her for her skills of conversation. She'd left scars on his body and he'd enjoyed the getting of them.

"Yes," she said, staring up at him with large, helpless eyes. He fumbled for his coat, helping her into it.

"What happened? Somebody hurt you? You want I should call the sheriff?"

She shook her head and pointed up the road.

"You need a lift? I can give you a lift. Where you headed? Not far with no clothes, huh? What happened to your clothes?"

"I have - - what you call - - bad luck?" Her voice was rusty from disuse. But he seemed to understand her well enough. He opened the door on the passenger side for her, and she slid in, vinyl seat cold against her bare bottom. He got in, moistening his lips, eyes flicking over her legs.

"Where to?"

"East," she said. There was the faintest trace of a scent to the east.

**Check out the rest of Chapter 1 under the fiction 'Vanago'**


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